New unfurl.org coming in summer 2009.

In the meantime: below is a 500-word bio for Kala Pierson, current as of June 2009. If you need a different word count, please contact k at unfurl dot org.

Kala Pierson is a composer and sound/media artist. Her music is fluid and kinetic, focused on gesture and momentum rather than steady rhythms. Its "seductive textures" (Washington Post) are "intricately structured, both mathematical and lyrical" (Dnevnik).

In 2008 and 2009, her music was performed in Germany, Italy, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, Serbia, and 15 U.S. cities; in festivals including Musica Viva, Contemporanea (Citta di Udine), Spark, and Canaan Downs; and in venues ranging from a forest to a medieval fortress to the World Financial Center Winter Garden.

U.S.-born and NYC-based, she focuses on multi-country projects and collaborations. She co-founded Summer in Sombor, an international composition seminar held each July in northern Serbia. Her site-specific audio installation series Singing Stones will travel in Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. Since 2004, her Axis of Beauty project has combined music and media with texts by Middle Eastern writers, in an ongoing response to "Axis of Evil" propaganda. She has worked with many other artists in the U.S. and elsewhere, particularly dancers and choreographers.

She has been an Artist in Residence at Tribeca Performing Arts Center and a resident composer in the Composers and the Voice series at American Opera Projects. Her commissions include those from Queens University Belfast and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (U.K.), for audio installed in a permanent interactive exhibit at the University; and from Composers Collaborative (U.S.), for a 20-minute work for string quartet and voice in the Non Sequitur Festival. In 2008, she was one of ten composers shortlisted for the Sorel Medallion (Voices of Ascension / Carnegie Hall).

Born in 1977, she studied at Eastman School of Music (with Joseph Schwantner, Augusta Read Thomas, David Liptak and Robert Morris), where she held a George Eastman Scholarship; Bard College at Simon's Rock, where she won the Dean's Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts; and Tanglewood Institute/BUTI. At Eastman, she also played in the Balinese gamelan and co-founded Ossia and Alarm Will Sound. Later, she co-founded the South Oxford Six composers' collective. She has taught, read at conferences, and published in music journals in the U.S. and Germany, and for two years, she taught media and web design as adjunct faculty in Fordham University's journalism program at Lincoln Center. Her awards and residency invitations include Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the German Ministry of Culture, Meet the Composer, Wildacres, Hedgebrook, COAHSI, NGCSA, and the Visiting Artists program of the American Academy in Rome.

Her music has been performed by American Opera Projects, San Francisco Choral Artists (as winner of their New Voices competition), Cantate Chamber Singers (as winner of their Composition Competition), Nurse Kaya Sextet, Momenta Quartet, Season Quartet, the Baltimore Choral Arts Society Young Composers Project with Toby Twining's group Mouth Music, New York Miniaturist Ensemble, Tanglewood Young Artists Chorus, and many soloists and duos. Her media work has been exhibited at the Seattle Center on Contemporary Art, Richmond Art Gallery and other venues, and her audio editing and mixing credits include recordings on Cantaloupe Records and Nonesuch/Atlantic.