Meet our Current creators 

Baldwin Giang

Baldwin Giang is an internationally performed composer, pianist, interdisciplinary creator, and educator whose music aims to empower communities of audiences and performers by creating concert experiences that are opportunities for collective wonder and judgment. He won the Samuel Barber Rome Prize and is in residence as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome from 2023-2024. Baldwin recently completed a 2022-2023 Fulbright artist Fellowship in Taiwan and was appointed as a composer-in-residence with the Louisville Orchestra in 2024-2025. Described as “taut and cohesive…challenging and rewarding” (Cacophony), Baldwin’s music has been performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, Symphony Center in Chicago, and Chateau de Fontainebleau.  

Baldwin’s work has been presented at numerous festivals throughout North America and Europe. Baldwin is a graduate of Yale University, earning a B.A. with Honors in both Music and Political Science, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, earning an M.A. as a Regents Fellow. He is currently a PhD student and Division of Humanities Fellow at the University of Chicago. 

Brittany J. Green

Brittany J. Green is a North Carolina-based composer, performer, and educator. Described as “a creative force of attention-seizing versatility” (The Washington Post) and “cinematic in the best sense” (Chicago Classical Review), Brittany’s music works to facilitate collaborative, intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses. The intersections between sound, video, movement, and text serve as the focal point of these musical spaces, often questioning and redefining the relationships between these three elements. Recent works engage sonification and black feminist theory as tools for sonic world-building, exploring the construction, displacement, and rupture of systems. 

Brittany’s research and creative interests include contextualizing the work of Julius Eastman through the lens of queer and critical race theory. Her music has been featured at concerts and festivals worldwide. She holds a BM in Music Education from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and an MM in Music Composition and Theory from East Carolina University. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Music Composition at Duke University as a Deans Graduate Fellow. In her free time, Brittany enjoys learning about aviation, traveling, reading poetry, line dancing, video games, being in community with others, and spending time in front of the bonfire. 

Oswald Huỳnh

Oswald Huỳnh is a Vietnamese-American composer whose work navigates Vietnamese aesthetics and tradition, language and translation, and the relationship between heritage and identity. Huỳnh writes music that explores timbre and texture to create evocative soundscapes rooted in storytelling, culture, and memory. His orchestral work Gia Đình calls to these ideas by exploring the impact of intergenerational trauma, cultural inheritance, and what is lost between eras. Huỳnh’s latest work for orchestra, Beauty Despite Daylight, draws musical inspiration from ru con—traditional Vietnamese lullabies—and engages with themes of home, kinship, and isolation. 

As a composer, Huỳnh has been commissioned, premiered, and performed by ensembles and orchestras throughout the world. Huỳnh will serve as the Composer-in-Residence with the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra for their 2023/24 season and the Creator-in-Residence with the Louisville Orchestra for their 2024/25 season as part of their Creator Corps program. Huỳnh holds a Bachelor of Arts from Lewis & Clark College and a Master of Music from the University of Missouri. Currently based in Portland, Oregon, he is working at the American Composers Forum as the Artist Support Manager and teaching music theory with the Portland Youth Philharmonic. 

Revisit our past creators 

Alex Berko (2023–2024 Season)

The “stirring” (New York Times) and “intoxicating” (Philadelphia Inquirer) music of American composer Alex Berko (b. 1995) is characterized by a balance of intimacy and power, a keen sense of lyricism and emotional sensitivity, and a love of narrative. Berko’s music often poses questions about our personal environments and relationships with one another, and he is interested in weaving listeners through intimate stories and perspectives with universal values.

Berko’s music has been widely performed throughout the U.S. and abroad by orchestras, choirs, and chamber ensembles. His piece Lincoln was included on The Crossing’s album, Rising w/ The Crossing, released by New Focus Records. The album was met with critical acclaim: It was nominated for a 2022 GRAMMY ® for Best Choral Performance and was included in The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020 by The New York Times and NPR’s “A Diary Of Classical Albums For A Troubled 2020.”

Nkeiru Okoye (2023–2024 Season)

American composer and lyricist Nkeiru Okoye has been hailed as “gripping” and “evocative” by the New York Times. Okoye won The American Prize in vocal chamber music for her song cycle, We Met At the Symphony. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2021-23 Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellow. In 2020, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra appointed her Composer-in-Residence for their “Classical Roots Festival,” featuring her work, Black Bottom. 

Okoye’s music has been commissioned, performed, and presented by orchestras and opera houses throughout North America and Europe. Okoye believes in engaging communities through her music. She is a mentor composer for the National Association of Teachers of Singing Art Song Initiative and the American Opera Project, Composers, and the Voice program. Her music is published exclusively through Theodore Presser. 

Tanner Porter (2023–2024 Season)

Tanner Porter is a composer-performer and songwriter. In her “original art songs that are by turns seductive and confessional” (Steve Smith, The New Yorker), Tanner explores her passion for storytelling, often framing her work within the imagery of the California coast she grew up on. Tanner’s orchestral music, described as “drop-dead gorgeous” (Jim Munson, Broadway World), has been commissioned by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony, and Nu Deco Ensemble, among others. 

Music as a vehicle for the mingling of multiple artistic mediums is at the heart of Tanner’s work, stemming from a reverence for theatrical productions and a deep love of song arrangement. Her most recent album of songs, The Summer Sinks, was recorded with LA-based studio Oak House Recording and can be heard on all streaming platforms. 

Lisa Bielawa (2022-23 Season)

Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. In 1997, Bielawa co-founded the MATA Festival. For her 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship period, Bielawa is writing a new opera and a book of prose vignettes from her experiences and encounters with music in a variety of international settings.

Bielawa consistently executes work that incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin in San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the coronavirus lockdown, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents through her project, Broadcast from Home. In 2022, Bielawa was selected for a residency with the Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps, during which she wrote new orchestral and community-based works to engage the Louisville community.

TJ Cole (2022-23 Season)

TJ Cole (they/them) is a composer and synthesizer performer originally from the suburbs of Atlanta, currently residing in Louisville, KY. For their 2022-23 Creators Corps residency, they wrote new large-scale works for orchestra and curated and composed music to be paired with children’s stories performed across Louisville Free Public Libraries. They also partnered on a project with VOICES of Kentuckiana, an LGBTQ+ and alliances community chorus based in Louisville. They have been commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Nashville in Harmony, and Intersection, among many others.

TJ is active as a solo synthesizer performer, singer-songwriter, producer, and engineer. They perform in the Louisville-based duo Choir Siren and previously in the electronic synth-pop band Twin Pixie, which focused on making music at the intersection of queerness, pop culture, and the supernatural. Besides music, TJ also enjoys cooking, sewing, video games, swing sets on playgrounds, and playing with their cat, Zucchini.

Tyler Taylor (2022-23 Season)

Tyler Taylor is a composer-performer from Louisville, KY. Much of his work is dedicated to creating abstract musical analogies for social-political happenings, both present and past. Common among these pieces is a sense of contradiction – sometimes whimsical, sometimes alarming – that comes from the interaction of diverse musical layers. In his role as a resident composer for the 2022-23 Creators Corps, Tyler not only wrote music for the orchestra but also worked closely with community organizations, schools, and programs in the city of Louisville. He established and taught the Louisville Orchestra Young Composer Program for JCPS students grades 4-12, where students had new compositions workshopped and performed by members of the LO (Louisville Orchestra). 

He has been commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra, Washington and Lee State University, the Youth Performing Arts School, the Chicago Composers Orchestra, the Indiana University New Music Ensemble, the Indiana Band Masters Association, the National Orchestral Institute, and more. In addition to his pursuits in composition, Tyler also performs the horn in various settings ranging from recitals of contemporary music to professional orchestral settings, including the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic, Huntington Symphony, Louisville Ballet, and the Owensboro Symphony. He maintains a studio of young horn players in Louisville and southern Indiana.