Community Opening: Douglas R. Ewart

Douglas R. Ewart is a composer, improviser, visual artist, and educator. Since immigrating to Chicago from Jamaica in 1963, he has dedicated his decades-long career to performances and sculptures that interweave sonic and visual disciplines. A former chairman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Ewart has also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1990. In 1987, he earned a prestigious U.S.-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship to support studying the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute, in Japan. He has performed internationally, including at the Walker and Carnegie Hall and in festivals across Europe and Latin America. 

George E. Lewis is a composer, musicologist, trombonist, and Professor of American Music at Columbia University. He is a member of the AACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Akademie der Künste, and the British Academy. A MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, Lewis has also received the Doris Duke Artist Award and the Alpert Award in the Arts, and his opera, The Comet (2024), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023, co-edited with Harald Kisiedu).

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