Amanda Schoofs

Composer/Vocalist Amanda Schoofs creates visceral works that emphasize timbre, presence, and ritual while exposing the raw, brilliant, and intimate qualities of the human spirit. Trained in contemporary composition and theory, her creative practice extends from the experimental tradition and exists in the space between diverse artistic practices. At the nexus of composition, improvisation, painting, printmaking, poetry, performance art, and authentic movement, Amanda creates provocative works that are uniquely interdisciplinary. Audiences and critics throughout the United States, Germany and Canada have described her work as “entirely original, breathtaking in its delivery”, "ethereal", and “a transporting, enigmatic reverie”.Amanda is on the composition faculty at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts, where she directs Contemporary Music Ensemble and teaches Experimental Improvisation. She curates the series Sensoria: Experiments in Time-Based Media and Performance for INOVA - Institute of Visual Arts, and teaches composition with the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra, in collaboration with Present Music. Amanda holds a MA in Music Composition from Mills College, where she won the Elizabeth Crothers Mills Award, and studied composition and improvisation with Joëlle Léandre, Pauline Oliveros, Zeena Parkins, Roscoe Mitchell, and Fred Frith. An invested academic, she was recently a Transdisciplinary Fellow at Center for 21^st Century Studies, researching the cross-disciplinary intersections of language.