Jonathan Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 winner of the Rome Prize, Berger was the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA, now the Stanford Arts Institute) and founding director of Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology. Described as “gripping” by both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, “poignant,” and “richly evocative” (San Francisco Chronicle), “taut, and hauntingly beautiful” (NY Times), Berger’s recent works deal with both consciousness and conscience. The Kronos Quartet toured the recent monodrama, My Lai internationally. Thrice commissioned by The National Endowment for the Arts, Berger’s recent commissions include The Mellon and Rockefeller Foundations, Chamber Music Society, Lincoln Center, and Chamber Music America. In addition to composition, Berger is an active researcher with over 80 publications in a wide range of fields relating to music, science, and technology, and has held research grants from DARPA, the Wallenberg Foundation, The National Academy of Sciences, the Keck Foundation, and others.

Academy Award winning Hildur Guðnadóttir is an Icelandic composer, cello player, and singer who has been manifesting herself at the forefront of experimental pop and contemporary music. In her solo works she draws out a broad spectrum of sounds from her instrument, ranging from intimate simplicity to huge soundscapes. Her work for Film and Television includes “Sicario: Day of the Soldado”, “Mary Magdalene”, “Tom of Finland”, “Journey’s End” and 20 episodes of the Icelandic TV series “Trapped” (streaming on Amazon Prime).

In addition, her body of work includes scores for films such “Joker” starring Joaquin Phoenix, for which she won a Golden Globe award for Best Original Score and an Academy Award. Alongside the critically acclaimed HBO series “Chernobyl”, for which she received a Primetime Emmy award and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.

“The HBO series stunning success owes much to Guðnadóttir’s evocative score, as discomfiting as the tragic history or malevolence on screen.” – Sydney Morning Herald

Gudnadóttir began playing cello as a child, entered the Reykjavík Music Academy and then moved on to musical studies/composition and new media at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and Universität der Künste Berlin.

Hildur has released four critically acclaimed solo albums: Mount A (2006), Without Sinking (2009), Leyfðu Ljósinu (2012), Saman (2014). Her records have been nominated a number of times for the Icelandic Music Awards. Hildur’s albums are all released on Touch.

She has composed music for theatre, dance performances and films. The Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, Icelandic National Theatre, Tate Modern, The British Film Institute, The Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm and Gothenburg National Theatre are amongst the institutions that have commissioned new works by Hildur. She was nominated for the Nordic Music Council Prize as composer of the year 2014.

Among others Hildur has performed live and recorded music with Skúli Sverrisson, Jóhann Jóhannsson, múm, Sunn O))), Pan Sonic, Hauschka, Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, The Knife, Fever Ray, OSMIUM, and Throbbing Gristle.

In 2018 Hildur was nominated for a Discovery of the Year Award at the World Soundtrack Academy in Gent and received several prestigious awards, including the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Score (“Mary Magdalene”) and Best Score at the Beijing International Film Festival for “Journey’s End”.

Hildur lives in Berlin, Germany.

Born in Lviv, Ukrainian singer, actress and composer Mariana Sadovska crosses all borders in her work, creating her own innovative compositions and arrangements in dialogue with ancient traditions. Archaic midsummer night invocations, wedding songs, and emigrant chants from remote villages in rural Ukraine get a singular turn and transmute into contemporary sound, from folk to avant-garde.

Sadovska was trained as a classical pianist at Lviv’s National Music School, and later joined Les Kurbas Theatre, one of Ukraine’s leading theater companies. In the 1990s Sadovska worked as a principal actor, composer, and music director with the Teatr Gardzienice in Poland, acclaimed for its virtuoso “anthropological-experimental” performances rooted in rugged fieldwork in isolated rural areas of the world. 

Since 2001 she has been composing vocal music for different international theatre and music ensembles in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and the USA. Her composition SCLAVI – the song of an emigrant with Farm in the Cave of Prague was nominated for the Alfred-Radok Award. The Rusalka Cycle: songs between the worlds toured many festivals, such as the Giving Voice Festival, Globalize:Cologne in Germany, and Revolutions International Theatre Festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Her solo concerts and band projects have brought her to many festivals and concert halls in Germany, France, Israel, Afghanistan, and the US. Sadovska has received a scholarship grant from the Earth Foundation in New Yorkm, a Künstlerstipendium from Staatskanzlei NRW/Germany, and a Fulbright fellowship, and was a scholar at the Princeton Atelier, a multidisciplinary artists program curated by Toni Morrison at Princeton University. She lives with her husband and two children in Cologne, Germany.