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Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison

composer

About this Artist

Though born in Miami, MICHAEL GORDON was raised in an Eastern European community on the outskirts of Managua in Nicaragua, returning to Florida when he was eight. While studying at New York University and Yale, he played in the rock band Peter and the Girlfriends, later forming the Michael Gordon Philharmonic to play his own compositions. In 1987 he co-founded the Bang on a Can Festival with his wife, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang. He has received commissions supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, the BBC Proms, the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, among others.

Filmmaker BILL MORRISON has eight titles in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, including Light Is Calling, Decasia, and The Film of Her. His films have been screened at The Tate Modern, Lincoln Center, The Whitney Museum, London's ICA, MassMOCA, The Wexner Center, BAM, The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, and they have been featured at international film festivals worldwide, such as Sundance, Rotterdam, San Francisco, and Karlovy Vary. His projected set work with the acclaimed performance ensemble Ridge Theater has been recognized with two "Bessie" awards for excellence in theatrical design (1993, 2003) and a Village Voice "Obie" for collaborative design (2001). In recent years, Bill has received grants from The Guggenheim Foundation (2000), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2003), NYSCA (2003), NYFA (2001), NEA (2004), and Creative Capital (2001). Decasia premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and was named one of the ten best films of 2003 by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice. The film has aired repeatedly on the Sundance Channel, and was released on DVD by Plexifilm in January 2004.