Shawn Jaeger
Shawn Jaeger was the 2013 Northwestern University Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
He was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1985. His music often draws
inspiration from Appalachian folksong and hymnody, and has been performed by Dawn Upshaw and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Contemporaneous, at venues including Zankel Hall, Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, the Morgan Library, (Le) Poisson Rouge, and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. He has received commissions from Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Bard College Conservatory of Music Graduate Vocal Arts Program, the JFund/American Composers Forum, and the BMI Foundation/Concert Artists Guild. Honors include the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Northwestern University M. William Karlins and William T. Faricy Awards, and two BMI Student Composer Awards. Jaeger holds a DMA in composition from Northwestern University, and a BM from the University of Michigan. He lives in New York City.
An Opera Double Bill from The Fisher Center on Vimeo.
Shane Ward
Shane Ward was the 2013 University of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
Shane is an American artist who lives and works in Chicago. His work is dedicated to themes of
war and romance, capital and masculinity, violence and emancipation, surface luster and value. Shane is after the relationship between the grave and the monument, the mine and jewelry box, the wound and the mend. Of late, he has thought of this as a sustained inquiry into the nature of victory, its relationship to liberty, and its ultimate fragility.
Shane earned his MFA from the University of Chicago in 2012. He currently teaches in the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Matt Ulery
Matt Ulery was the 2013 DePaul Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
The Chicago-based bassist/composer and bandleader has developed an instantly recognizable sound. Known for his sweeping lyricism, unconventional phrase structures, expressionistic emotionalism, Ulery’s music is informed by the entire spectrum of jazz, classical, rock, pop, and folk– specifically American, South American, Balkan, and other European folk styles. He performs not only on upright and electric bass, but doubles on tuba.
For a decade, Ulery has been the leader of his own groups and frequent collaborator. Ulery has produced and released 6 albums of all original music under his name including his three most recent releases of critical acclaim, “By a Little Light,” “Wake an Echo,” and “In the Ivory,” on Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf Music record label in 2012-2014.
Ulery earned a Master of Music degree at Depaul University and Bachelors degree in music composition at The Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University and has played in bands with Kurt Rosenwinkel, Phil Markowitz, Jimmy Chamberlin, Fareed Haque, Grazyna Auguscik, Howard Levy, Patricia Barber, Goran Ivanovic, Jeff Parker, Zach Brock, and many others. As a composer, Ulery has collaborated with ensembles such as eighth blackbird and the New Millennium Orchestra of Chicago.
When not touring parts of the U.S. and Europe, Matt appears regularly in the Chicago area music venues and has performed with his groups at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, Chicago Orchestra Hall, Millennium Park Pritzker Pavillion, Chicago Cultural Center, The Krannert Center, Blues Alley, Jazz Showcase, The Metro and countless other fine music listening rooms.
Meghan Moe Beitiks
Meghan Moe Beitiks was the 2013 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
Moe works with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. She analyzes perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that interrogates relationships with the non-human. The work emerges as video, performance, installation, writing or photography depending on what arises from her process of research and improvisation.
She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studied playwriting, acting, movement and scenic design. She has an MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied Bio Art, Social Practice, Environmental Chemistry, and performance methodologies.
As part of her year as an Edes Awardee, within which she sought to develop her practice according to Karen Barad’s concept of “Intra-Action,” Moe spent several months at a SymbioticA, the Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts, in Perth, Australia. She trained with scientists at La Trobe University in Melbourne regarding the proper care and handling of anerobic bacteria, then returned to Perth to build her own anerobic facilities and perform with them. This was for a piece called A Lab for Apologies and Forgiveness v.5, part of a larger series within which Moe looks at what it means to apologize to a site that has been altered or contaminated by human use. She was also a fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art and Arts Residency, and presented work at the World Stage Design conference and the Out of Site Festival in Chicago. Documentation of work from her Edes year was later displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
She has presented work in California, Connecticut, Chicago, Nevada, Michigan, Brooklyn, Wales, London, Latvia and Russia. She was a Fulbright Student Fellow in Theater to Latvia and received a MacDowell Colony fellowship from the Leon Levy Foundation following her Edes award year, as well as residencies at the Kala Art Institute and the I-Park Foundation.
