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Blackhorse Lowe is a filmmaker from the Navajo Nation. His current feature film, Fukry, screened at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media arts festival. Chasing the Light, his previous feature, won the Best Cinematography prize at the Terres en Vues/Land InSights Montreal First Peoples Festival 2016. The film has played to great praise at many domestic and international film festivals such as imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Skabmagovat Film Festival and the Maoriland Film Festival.

He is a 2012 Sundance Institute Native Producing Fellow. Lowe’s feature directorial debut 5th World premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and screened at film festivals around the world. He received the New Mexico New Visions Contract Award and Panavision Award for a short film he wrote and directed titled Shimásáni. The film premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and went on to screen at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, as well as other festivals around the world garnering many awards and accolades along the way.

A recipient of a Re:New Media Award, Lowe is an alumni of the Sundance Institute’s NativeLab, Producers Lab and Screenwriters Writers Lab. Currently he is a 2019 Tulsa Artist Fellow recipient, writing a variety of genre features and programming film screenings in the Tulsa area.

Matthew Aucoin, a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, was named LA Opera's first ever Artist in Residence, a position he held from 2016 to 2020. He has conducted LA Opera productions of Akhnaten (2016) and Rigoletto (2018), as well as concert performances of his own opera Crossing (2018) and performances of Joby Talbot's new score for the film Vampyr (2018).  In 2020, he conducted the world premiere of his newest opera, Eurydice, in Los Angeles; the opera will subsequently be presented by the Metropolitan Opera.

He will return to LA Opera in 2021 for a chamber music program (which will include music he has composed) entitled Veils of Desire.

Born in 1990, he is an American composer, conductor, writer and pianist. In the 2014/15 season, he conducted the premieres of two of his operas: Crossing at Boston’s American Repertory Theater (directed by Diane Paulus); and Second Nature, a chamber opera for the young, at Lyric Opera of Chicago. He wrote the libretti for both works. He is currently at work on a new opera for the Metropolitan Opera / Lincoln Center Theater’s New Works program. In the coming season, he will conduct the premiere of his new orchestral work, commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. His new song cycle, set to texts by James Merrill and co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New York, and Wigmore Hall, London, will be premiered by tenor Paul Appleby and pianist Ken Noda at recitals in New York, Boston, Chicago, Notre Dame, and Miami. Violinist Jennifer Koh will premiere Aucoin’s new solo violin work at the New York Philharmonic Biennale and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

He is also at work on a piano concerto commissioned by The Gilmore for pianist Charlie Albright. This season, he makes conducting debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Music Academy of the West (Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, as well as his own chamber opera Second Nature); the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari, Italy (The Marriage of Figaro); and he returns to the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. In recent seasons, he has appeared as a conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Rome Opera Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago (a special event featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma) and Juilliard Opera (Eugene Onegin). (MatthewAucoin.com)

Poet and teacher Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series. He is the recipient of a 92Y Discovery Prize, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at Diné College

Learn more at JakeSkeets.com.

Photo credit: Quanah Yazzie

Matthew Aucoin, a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, was named LA Opera's first ever Artist in Residence, a position he held from 2016 to 2020. He has conducted LA Opera productions of Akhnaten (2016) and Rigoletto (2018), as well as concert performances of his own opera Crossing (2018) and performances of Joby Talbot's new score for the film Vampyr (2018).  In 2020, he conducted the world premiere of his newest opera, Eurydice, in Los Angeles; the opera will subsequently be presented by the Metropolitan Opera.

He will return to LA Opera in 2021 for a chamber music program (which will include music he has composed) entitled Veils of Desire.

Born in 1990, he is an American composer, conductor, writer and pianist. In the 2014/15 season, he conducted the premieres of two of his operas: Crossing at Boston’s American Repertory Theater (directed by Diane Paulus); and Second Nature, a chamber opera for the young, at Lyric Opera of Chicago. He wrote the libretti for both works. He is currently at work on a new opera for the Metropolitan Opera / Lincoln Center Theater’s New Works program. In the coming season, he will conduct the premiere of his new orchestral work, commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. His new song cycle, set to texts by James Merrill and co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New York, and Wigmore Hall, London, will be premiered by tenor Paul Appleby and pianist Ken Noda at recitals in New York, Boston, Chicago, Notre Dame, and Miami. Violinist Jennifer Koh will premiere Aucoin’s new solo violin work at the New York Philharmonic Biennale and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

He is also at work on a piano concerto commissioned by The Gilmore for pianist Charlie Albright. This season, he makes conducting debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Music Academy of the West (Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, as well as his own chamber opera Second Nature); the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari, Italy (The Marriage of Figaro); and he returns to the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. In recent seasons, he has appeared as a conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Rome Opera Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago (a special event featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma) and Juilliard Opera (Eugene Onegin). (MatthewAucoin.com)

He is a 2021 winner of the Metropolitan Opera's Beverly Sills Artist Award. He began performing professionally at the age of 11 and has since appeared in opera, concert, recital, film, and on Broadway. He is an exclusive recording artist with Decca Gold, and his first album was released in September of 2018. Mr. Costanzo has appeared with many of the world’s leading opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, English National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Canadian Opera Company, Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Dallas Opera, Teatro Real Madrid, Spoleto Festival USA, Glimmerglass Festival and Finnish National Opera. In concert he has sung with the New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, among others. He has performed at a wide-ranging variety of venues including Carnegie Hall, Versailles, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Sawdust, Minamiza Kyoto, Joe’s Pub, the Guggenheim, the Park Avenue Armory and Madison Square Garden.

Mr. Costanzo is a Grand Finals winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and he won first prize in Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition. He was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for his role in a Merchant Ivory film. He has begun working as a producer and curator in addition to a performer, creating shows for National Sawdust, Opera Philadelphia, the Philharmonia Baroque, Princeton University, WQXR, the State Theater in Salzburg, Master Voices and Kabuki-Za Tokyo.

Mr. Costanzo graduated from Princeton University where he has returned to teach, and he received his masters from the Manhattan School of Music. In his youth he performed on Broadway and alongside Luciano Pavarotti. (AnthonyRothCostanzo.com)

Heralded as “a singer of immense power and fervor” by the Los Angeles Times, Davóne Tines came to international attention during the 2015/16 season in breakout performances at the Dutch National Opera premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars and at the Ojai Music Festival presenting works by Caroline Shaw and Kaija Saariaho with the Calder Quartet and the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Highlights of the 2019/20 season include the European premiere of David Lang’s prisoner of the state with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Symphony, Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri with Louis Langrée and the Cincinnati Symphony, John Adams’ El Niño with David Robertson and the Houston Symphony, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Stéphane Denève and the Saint Louis Symphony. Davóne Tines appeared throughout the season on numerous concert stages in collaboration with the Dover Quartet and was presented by Carnegie Hall, Celebrity Series of Boston, Da Camera Society of Houston, and Vocal Arts DC in his first American recital tour with pianist Adam Nielsen.

Davóne Tines was co-creator and co-librettist (with Zack Winokur and composer Michael Schachter) of The Black Clown, a music theater experience inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem of the same name that animates a black man’s resilience against America’s legacy of oppression by fusing vaudeville, opera, jazz, and spirituals to bring Hughes’ verse to life onstage. The world premiere was given by the American Repertory Theater in 2018 and presented by Lincoln Center in 2019.

As a founding core member of the American Modern Opera Company, Davóne Tines has been featured in a wide array of productions including Henze’s El Cimarrón and John Adams’ Nativity Reconsidered, both presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the original work Were You There with music by Matthew Aucoin and Michael Schachter.

In 2019, Davóne Tines made his Opera Theatre of Saint Louis debut in the world premiere of Fire Shut Up In My Bones by Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons, based on the memoir of the American journalist, commentator and New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow. John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Girls of the Golden West was the platform for Davóne Tines’ San Francisco Opera debut, and the work was later given its European premiere by Dutch National Opera. He has appeared at the Opéra National de Paris, Teatro Real, and Finnish National Opera in Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains directed by Peter Sellars; and made his Brooklyn Academy of Music debut as Freddie Stowers in Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing in a production by Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus. He reprised that role in concert for his debut with LA Opera in 2018. Additional highlights include a new production of Oedipus Rex at Lisbon’s Teatro Nacional de São Carlos led by Leo Hussain, and Handel’s rarely staged serenata Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo at National Sawdust in a new production by Christopher Alden.

Davóne Tines’ concert appearances include performances of John Adams’ El Niño with Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the Orchestre national de France, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Royal Swedish Orchestra, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the San Francisco Symphony and with Pablo Res Broseta and the Seattle Symphony, and a program exposing the Music of Resistance by George Crumb, Julius Eastman, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Caroline Shaw with conductor Christian Reif and members of the San Francisco Symphony at SoundBox.

Davóne Tines is a winner of the 2020 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, recognizing extraordinary classical musicians of color who, early in their career, demonstrate artistic excellence, outstanding work ethic, a spirit of determination, and an ongoing commitment to leadership and their communities. He also is the recipient of the 2018 Emerging Artists Award given by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and is a graduate of Harvard University and The Juilliard School.

AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) has a mission to develop and produce a body of discipline-colliding work, to combine traditional and experimental artistic processes, and to maintain enduring creative relationships between its members. Founded by Artistic Directors Zack Winokur and Matthew Aucoin, AMOC is made up of some of the most adventurous singers, dancers and instrumentalists at work today in the fields of contemporary and classical music and dance.

The company’s upcoming projects include The No One’s Rose, a new music-dance-theater work created in partnership with San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Stanford Live, and Comet Poppea, which includes an AMOC-commissioned opera by composer George Lewis and is produced in collaboration with Anthony Roth Costanzo and Cath Brittan. Additionally, AMOC will serve as the Ojai Music Festival’s 2022 Music Director, only the second ensemble and the first explicitly interdisciplinary company to hold the position in the festival’s 75-year history.

Past projects include Zack Winokur’s production of Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón, starring Davóne Tines, which has been performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as the American Repertory Theater; a new arrangement of John Adams’s El Niño, premiered at the Met Cloisters as part of Julia Bullock’s season-long residency at the Met Museum; Davóne Tines’s and Winokur's Were You There, a meditation on Black lives lost in recent years to police violence; and Bobbi Jene Smith and Keir GoGwilt’s dance/music works With Care and A Study on Effort, which have been produced at San Francisco’s ODC Theater, Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and elsewhere. Conor Hanick’s performance of CAGE, Zack Winokur’s production of John Cage’s music for prepared piano, was cited as the best recital of the year by The New York Times in 2018 and The Boston Globe in 2019. 

In 2017, the year the company was founded, AMOC also created the Run AMOC! Festival at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA; the company has curated and performed that festival annually for the past three years. The company’s past engagements also include performances at the Big Ears Festival, the Caramoor Festival, National Sawdust, the Clark Art Institute, and the San Diego Symphony. The company has also been in residence at the Park Avenue Armory and Harvard University.

Learn more at RunningAMOC.org.