Graduate Students

E. Ceyda Çekmeci

Musicology

Ceyda Çekmeci is a PhD candidate in Musicology, whose research lies at the intersection of music studies and sociology. Her dissertation focuses on music, hegemony, and the aesthetics of authoritarian neoliberalism in contemporary Turkey. More broadly, Ceyda’s research interests include music in authoritarian contexts and the political efficacy of art in rising illiberal democracies. Her doctoral work has been supported by the Berkeley Fellowship.

Prior to her PhD at UC Berkeley, Ceyda worked as a choir conductor in various public and private institutions in Istanbul, most notably...

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...

Luke Dzwonczyk

Composition

Luke Dzwonczyk is a composer and technologist whose work is centered on engaging emerging technologies with music creation and performance. He has applied his technical and creative skills to a variety of projects and collaborations in the Berkeley community and abroad, including work with dancers, singers, and visual artists. His research focuses on the intersection of computational creativity, generative machine learning, and audio-visual art.

Pablo M. Teutil

Composition

Pablo M. Teutli is a young Mexican composer interested in observing the society around him to portray it through allegorical and imaginative musical narratives. He studied music composition at the Faculty of Music of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, at the Jacobs School of Music of Indiana University, and at UC Berkeley. His professional training has been under the guidance of composers Lucía Álvarez, Arturo Márquez, Ken Ueno, P. Q. Phan, David Dzubay and Maria Granillo. In 2020 he received the Young Creators Grant from the National Fund for Culture and Arts. He...

Matthew Monaco

Matthew T. Monaco (born November 24, 1997) is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2022, Matthew received his master’s degree from the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP), where he studied composition with Stefano Gervasoni and electronic music with Yan Maresz, Luis Naon, et Grégoire Lorieux. In May 2020, he received his Bachelor of Music from the New England Conservatory, where he studied with Stratis Minakakis, minoring in music theory.

His works have been performed in the United States and...

Collin Ziegler

Musicology

Collin researches French musical thought in the Third Republic, examining how musicians and writers turned to surprising texts, histories, and contexts—particularly related to the Symbolist and phenomenology movements—as alternatives to the musical thought circulating in Parisian institutions like musical societies and the Paris Conservatoire. Collin is particularly interested in how these discourses evolved around a changing conception of text, in which discourses about writing and communication inspired new thought about the experience of music.

Collin recently presented papers at...

Allison Jerzak

Musicology

Allison Jerzak’s research on the history of digital music and music recommendation sits at the intersection of Historical Musicology, Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Data Studies. Her work experience in the technology sector — first at Epic Systems as a Project Manager, and then at the Willy Street Co-op as a Data Analyst — sparked an interest in sociotechnical systems. In particular, she became interested in how workers at various technology companies were seen as “experts” in fields such as healthcare, despite often having only technical expertise. Over time...

Rodney Padovani

Musicology

Born and raised in the Caribbean, Rodney graduated in Spring 2023 with a BA magna cum laude in History of the Americas, Foreign Languages (French and German), and Music (with some credits in Latin American Art History) from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus (UPRRP), where he was awarded the Luis Muñoz Marin Prize in History of the Americas.

As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow (MMUF), he worked on interdisciplinary undergraduate papers in the fields of Music, History, and Art History, such as his recently published article "Forms of Resistance and Exclusion in...

Sarah Grace Graves

Composition

Composer, improviser, and vocal artist SARAH GRACE GRAVES explores complex, unnamed emotions through the re-embodiment of physical sensation. In delving into sensation as a core musical parameter, she often collaborates closely with other vocalists: night vision (2019) for two voices, her collaboration with vocalist Niki Lada at IlSuono Contemporary Music Week, explores the dramatic potential of different levels of vocal stability, intensity, and turbulence; Both/And (2018) for two vocalists and two percussionists, created in collaboration with countertenor Andrew Joseph Leggett, examines...

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...