Student

Aine Nakamura

Composition

Art of Voice and Body
performance, improvisation, composition, stories, poetry, theater, interdisciplinary art

I attune to depth of stories and create a sonic and visual space through my voice and body. I focus on the nuanced potentialities of my voice, and my body of listening and sensing. I try to cross boundaries within and outside of my body in my attempt to defy traditional power structures that preclude new ways of feelings. I think about sound of the snow outside the window, a song inside body, and memories at site. I listen to inner, silence, temporality of insects...

Dionysius Arya Nataraja

Composition

Dion Nataraja is a composer, experimental vocalist, and scholar from Indonesia. He graduated from Bennington College and is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at UC Berkeley. His musical and scholarly works have been focusing on the intersection of areas such as Javanese gamelan, electroacoustic music, microtonality, instrument building, and critical theory. The composer-pianist Anthony Cheung described Dion’s music as “a true intercultural music for our time.” By the gamelan composer-performer Wahyu Thoyyib Pambayun, his music has been described as “succeeded in expanding the...

Soren Nyhus

Musicology

Soren Nyhus is a first-year Musicology PhD student at UC Berkeley. He received a Bachelor’s in Music from Harvard University in 2022 and an MPhil in Music from Cambridge University in 2023. His master’s thesis, “The Italian Renaissance in Viennese Opera of the First World War”, investigates the ways in which portrayals of the Renaissance in operas performed at the Vienna Hofoper during World War I navigated questions of ethnic, religious, and political identities. He is broadly interested in questions of modernism and nationalism in the early twentieth century, especially in the German-...

Camden James Oberg

Musicology

Rodney Padovani

Musicology
Born and raised in the Caribbean, Rodney is a musicologist and PhD student whose research focuses on post-war contemporary music in Puerto Rico. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow (MMUF), he previously worked on interdisciplinary research in music, history, and art history. His current work examines Puerto Rican music through the lens of post-colonialism and modernism frameworks, to understand how music festivals—from Festival Casals in the 1960s to later contemporary music festivals and biennials—shaped the landscape of new music in Puerto Rico. Rodney explores how these festivals...

George Papajohn

Composition

Sarah Plovnick

Ethnomusicology

I use ethnographic methods to study the role of audio communication in contentious political environments. My dissertation, entitled “Sounding Through the Firewall: A Narrative of Audio Communication Between Taiwan and China,” examines the recent history of the Taiwan Strait (1949-today) from the perspective of music and sound.

Originally from the Boston area, I completed a B.A. in Music and Comparative Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to my doctoral studies, I spent a year in the Dominican Republic, during which I studied the intersection of jazz with Afro-...

Everardo Reyes

Everardo “Ever” Reyes (Rarámuri descent and Chicanx) is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersections between music, social movements, and Indigenous self-determination. His dissertation focuses on the contemporary sonic and political influences of the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz Island by the Indians of All Tribes on Indigenous social movements. Ever also works on Rarámuri and Nahuatl language revitalization through music technology and songwriting with the Indigenous Poetics Lab at the Arts Research Center and...

Danniel Ribeiro

Composition

Danniel Ribeiro is a Brazilian composer born in Bahia. Recently, Danniel’s practice has explored instrumental music, developing ways to expand the use of instruments by way of bespoke techniques, preparations, practical sculptural (and found) objects, amplification, and transduced electronics.

In Brazil, Danniel studied with Paulo Costa Lima and Wellington Gomes, composers who continued the cultural resistance of the Grupo de Compositores da Bahia (Group of Composers of Bahia). In 2012, 2014 and 2016, he was awarded the Funarte Prize for Classical...

Caitlin Belem Brown Romtvedt

Ethnomusicology

Caitlin Belem Brown Romtvedt is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology. Born and raised in Buffalo, Wyoming, she grew up in a Basque community in a musical family. After high school, she spent a year in Brazil as a Rotary exchange student, which sparked an enduring interest in Brazilian music, dance, and society. At Oberlin College, she graduated with a Latin American studies major and a dance minor. Between Oberlin and UC Berkeley, she spent extensive time in Brazil, Cuba, and the Basque Country and made a living teaching and performing Brazilian and Latin music, Basque music, and North...