RESULTS OF THE 2026 NEW YORK WOMEN COMPOSERS SEED MONEY GRANTS
Presenting the winners of our 2026 Seed Money Grants! This year we were able to award an unprecedented nine grants of $1000 each to a diverse group of performers. We will support four focused concerts and five disseminated projects. One of the focused grants will be presenting their concert twice; several grantees will blend composers’ music with other art forms, multimedia, or thematic presentations. Concerts will take place in NYC, upstate New York, and other areas of the country, as well as Japan and Vietnam. The winners are listed alphabetically:
Breakfast Calculus (disseminated grant): Based in Ithaca, NY, Teagan Faran and Leo Sussman delight in curating theatrical and interactive performances that appeal to a broad community of listeners. Teagan plays violin and viola, as well as mandolin, octave violin, and other violin-shaped objects. Leo plays flute, piccolo, low flutes, SATB recorders, penny-whistle, and just about any other flute-like instrument he can get his hands on! We are both experienced and enthusiastic to further augment our performance practice through theatrical elements like speech, singing, movement, and auxiliary instruments (e.g. hand percussion) as well as fixed media, live electronics, and/or video. We also enjoy incorporating improvisation as a component of our performances. Breakfast Calculus is presently establishing our performance calendar and will give programs around the country, including Ithaca, NYC, and Seattle. We have experience building thematically-driven programs that promote musical storytelling and audience engagement by highlighting connections between pieces, and we are excited to craft several new programs drawing on the themes of pieces by NYWC members to perform for our upcoming concert engagements. Read and hear more at https://www.leosussman.com/breakfast-calculus.
Common Resonance (focused grant): Common Resonance is a New York–based concert series that extends the audience for contemporary classical music by leveraging the audiences and contexts of other art forms — most often visual art, in museum and gallery settings. For this project we propose a Pierrot-configuration program in 2026/2027, programmed substantially from a dedicated score call to the New York Women Composers membership. Our instrumentation is six performers – flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion, who are members of Orchestra Q. We will perform at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation in Manhattan with which we have an established working relationship, and where performances are professionally filmed and recorded. Read and hear more at https://whitneysheng.com/projects/
Jeremy Huw Williams (disseminated grant): The Welsh high baritone Dr. Jeremy Huw Williams collaborated on a previous project with NYWC five years ago, when he performed music by seven NYWC composers in a U.S. concert tour. He will be doing another five-concert tour this year beginning in late September and will again include NYWC composers. He is well known in the UK for his consistent advocacy of women composers, performing a great many past and present composers, including some he has commissioned, and has recorded several CDs featuring these works. Since his first concert is in September, he will be immediately issuing a score call and will do a Zoom session shortly, which will be recorded for all members to view. Read and hear more at www.jeremyhuwwilliams.com
Thomas Piercy (disseminated grant): The clarinetist Thomas Piercy is well known to NYWC for his previous Tokyo-to-New York series. His new ambitious project will present five or more concerts featuring flute, clarinet, cello, and piano in NYC, Tokyo, Japan, and, in a first for NYWC, Hanoi, Vietnam. All concerts will be audio and video recorded, and some will be presented as a livestream. Read and hear more at http://www.thomaspiercy.com/.
Skidmore College Orchestra (focused grant): Skidmore College Orchestra, one of Saratoga Springs’ most dedicated educational ensembles, will present a concert called “Adirondacks Amplified: Women Composers of New York.” The Skidmore College Orchestra is a semi-professional symphony orchestra made up of Skidmore undergraduates, from freshmen to seniors, playing alongside professional musicians from regional orchestras including the Albany Symphony, the Berkshire Symphony, the Schenectady-Saratoga Symphony, and the Glens Falls Symphony Orchestras. Two NYWC composers are already scheduled for this program (Rain Worthington and Judith Zaimont), with an additional NYWC composer to be selected from an open score call. The conductor of the orchestra is Georgia Markakis Mills, who submitted the proposal. Her website is here https://www.georgia-mills.com/ and the orchestra’s website is here: https://www.skidmore.edu/music/curriculum/ensembles/orchestra.php
Sugar Hill Salon (focused grant): Sugar Hill Salon is one of the first chamber music series and artistic collectives that centers on black and brown wind artistry in classical music. They are a black and queer-owned organization that offers free public concerts in Harlem that showcase wind repertoire that lacks representation within “traditional” chamber programming along with uplifting black and brown musicians performing them. This program will be part of our yearly concert series at Lucille’s Harlem, where we offer a free concert with free food. Read and hear more at www.sugarhillsalon.com.
Wild Muse Arts (disseminated grant): Wild Muse Arts is an interdisciplinary performance initiative that connects historical and contemporary music through ecological themes. Founded by pianist and educator Kathryn Felt, the concert series presents chamber and solo music performances in combination with visual art commissions, floral design installations, and environmental engagement to create immersive concert experiences. Wild Muse Arts presents performances in a historical barn at Faraway Farm Alpacas in Yorktown Heights, New York. Wild Muse Arts’ 2027 season, Liquid Listening, will explore themes of water, ecology, and environmental listening through chamber music performances at Faraway Farm Alpacas in Yorktown Heights, New York. The season is inspired by the interdisciplinary field of Blue Humanities, which examines human relationships to water systems, and connects contemporary music with the surrounding landscape of the Hudson Valley and New Croton Reservoir watershed. Wild Muse Arts will integrate NYWC repertoire alongside works by historical women composers and complementary chamber repertoire; this format allows audiences to encounter the music of women composers within a broader ecological framework. The season will consist of three main programs from April to October in 2027, each considering different states of water (e.g. mists, currents, and tides). Concerts will take place in an intimate 60-seat barn and include optional pre-concert farm tours focused on sustainability, pollinator practices, regenerative agriculture, and the relationship between farms and regional watershed systems. Read and hear more at www.wildmusearts.com/concerts.
Wurtz-Berger Duo (focused grant): The Wurtz-Berger Duo, a cello/piano duo who has been together since 2016 and is dedicated to performing the music from our time, expanding the repertoire, and bringing to light lesser-known works from the past, would like to deepen and strengthen relationships already established between NYWC composers and performer Amy Wurtz (who won a previous SMG for her month-long survey of NYWC solo piano music), building a wider, stronger bridge between the new music communities of New York City and Chicago. We will schedule two performances of the same repertoire, one in New York (potentially at Opera America), and the second in Chicago at The CheckOut, a brand-new chamber music venue operated by composer/director Seth Boustead, who himself divides his time between New York and Chicago. Half the program will be Chicago composers and half New York composers, utilizing a call for scores from NYWC to find the NY half, and a similar call for scores through New Music Chicago (NMC) to find the Chicago half. Read and hear more at https://www.wurtzbergerduo.com/.
Young-Kim-Medina Trio (disseminated grant): The trio of Drew Young (tenor/countertenor), Jean Sophie Kim (pianist), and Medina (clarinetist) will present Longing Hearts, a chamber music project that explores the emotional intersections of longing, memory, love, and the natural world through works by living women composers alongside reimagined traditional repertoire for clarinet, voice, and piano. The project centers an uncommon and largely untapped instrumentation—clarinet with tenor and piano, clarinet with countertenor and piano, as well as clarinet with tenor or countertenor alone—creating a distinctive sonic landscape that expands possibilities for both performers and audiences. The proposed concerts will feature works selected through the New York Women Composers call for scores and will be presented alongside women composers not associated with NYWC and arranged traditional works that complement the themes of the program. Longing Hearts will consist of two concert programs to be performed in New York City and Baltimore, Maryland. Each performer has an individual website. Read and hear at www.medinaclarinet.com; www.drewyoungmusic.com; www.jeansophiekim.com.
Please note: We encourage anyone not receiving a grant to re-apply, as the needs of the organization, the number of grants that it is possible to award, the instrumentation mix, the conditions of the grant, and the members of the jury change from year to year.
