Mabou Mines Associate Artists are integral members of our creative community and essential to our commitment to expanding creative networks and continuing the mission of the company.
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Photo credit: Mariana Meraz
Photo credit: Sabrina Santiago
Melanie Dyer (she/her) is a violist/composer who finds freedom in multiple arts disciplines as means of exploring sonic language and possibility, reflecting and responding to lived experience in the 21st century zeitgeist. Her body of work includes viola performance, music composition, theater, poetry/prose and visual arts. She has appeared at the Vision Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Festival Sons d’hiver, Jazz em Agosto, City of Asylum, Elastic Arts and Lincoln Center Outdoors. Her current projects are the Afro-Modernist ensemble WeFreeStrings, the Siren Xypher collective, and the Incalculable Likelihood of Being. She has performed and/or recorded with notable jazz /creative improvisers including Henry Grimes, Marshall Allen and the Sun Ra Arkestra, Tomeka Reid, William Parker, Charles Burnham, Joe Morris, Matana Roberts and James Brandon Lewis. She is the recipient of the NYSCA Support for Artists (’24), AFA Vision Artist (’23), Herb Alpert Ragdale Prize (’23), and grants from New Music USA, Chamber Music America, Jazz Road South Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the American Composers Forum/Innova.
Melanie studied with William Lincer (Principal Violist, NYPhilharmonic), Lee Yeingst (Principal Violist, Colorado Symphony Orchestra), John Jake Kella (NY Metropolitan Opera) and Naomi Fellows (Colorado Symphony Orchestra); and studied viola performance and theater at the LaMont School of Music/University of Denver. She matriculated in jazz/creative improvisation on bandstands in groups/sessions led by Salim Washington, Donald Smith, Joe Bonner and Makanda Ken McIntyre at St. Nick’s Pub and the Manhattan Healing Arts Center (NYC), Connolly’s Stardust Lounge and Wally’s (Boston).
Brooklyn born and bred artist Tamar-kali (she/her) is a second-generation musician with roots in the coastal Sea Islands of South Carolina. As a composer, Tamar-kali has defied boundaries to craft her own unique sound. As a performer, Tamar-kali speaks her lyrical truth with a supreme passion and a voice that will shake your foundation and shatter your expectations with its soulful intensity.
2017 marked her debut as a film score composer with Dee Rees’ Oscar-nominated “Mudbound.” Her ‘expressive and varied score’ [Variety] garnered her the World Soundtrack Academy’s 2018 Discovery of the Year Award and has been classified by Indiewire as one of the 25 Best Film Scores of the 21st Century. The soundtrack for her score to Josephine Decker’s psychological drama Shirley was named The Guardian’s Contemporary Album of the month in June 2020.
2022 saw her debut work from multiple commissions; the LA Opera digital short, “We Hold These Truths” directed by Peabody award winner dream hampton, a solo cello piece “Little Bear Awakens” for acclaimed cellist Matt Haimovitz’ THE PRIMAVERA PROJECT alongside composers Josqin des Prez and Philip Glass as well as a return to the stage to perform “Melancholy Ghosts and Other Mothers,” a Beth Morrison Projects commissioned song cycle.
2023 works included Freedom is a Constant Struggle, a concert curated and co-produced by the artist and presented by Lincoln Center featuring Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo; an orchestral love letter to her Gullah Geechee roots.
Watch Night, a theatrical work conceived and directed by Bill T. Jones and composed by Tamar-kali with a libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph made its world premiere as part of the long awaited Perelman Performing Arts Center’s inaugural season.
Spring 2024 will feature an excerpt of The Swann; a chamber opera work in progress inspired by William Dorsey Swann, the first American on record to pursue legal and political action to defend the LGBTQIA community’s right to gather. This staged concert at Harlem Stage follows the Catapult Opera commission digital short, Swann released at the start of NY Pride 2023.