Residency Dates: October 10, 2021 - October 30, 2021
Application Deadline: May 09, 2021
Due to COVID-19 and the immense stress it has put on artists, ACA will be offering FULL scholarships to all accepted artists for Residency #183! The Board of Trustees and staff feel protecting our core mission is paramount, and are grateful to the Pabst Steinmetz Foundation for allowing us to make this commitment to funding exceptional artists during these times. Application fee $25.
Shahzad Ismaily was born in the States to Pakistani parents who emigrated here just before his birth. He grew in a bicultural household, always following a multitude of paths and perusals. He is mostly self-taught as a musician, composer, recording engineer, and producer. He primarily plays electric bass, drums, percussion, guitar, synthesizers, and all manner of sound-makers procured in life’s travels. He has recorded and performed with a diverse crew of artMakers, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Beth Orton, Colin Stetson, Ben Frost, Bonnie Prince Billy, Damien Rice, Jolie Holland, JFDR, Secret Chiefs 3, Sam Amidon, further and further. He has been an integral member of festival/residency/collective experiences such as the People Festival (the brainchild of Bon Iver, The National, and the Michelberger), the Eau Claires festival, the Moers Festival. He has done work for dance and theater pieces, such as the film Frozen River (Oscar-nominated and Sundance award-winning), Inkboat (a butoh crew from California/Switzerland), and visual artist Laleh Khorramian. This year alone, he’ll teach in residence at BANFF, the Oklahoma Center for Contemporary Arts, the Monheim Triennale, and very happily, the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Currently based in Brooklyn and working out of the recording studio collective he founded and created, Figure 8 Recording, he has studied music extensively in Pakistan, India, Turkey, Mexico, Chile, Japan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Iceland.
Residency Statement:
I am a musician through and through. Early in my life, I have defined myself as a musician. Sound is my medium, my goal, my essence, especially the timing: spontaneity, the instantaneous transmission of spirit. Sure, we can talk Ableton live, audiomovers, bitwig, chord inversions, short cuts, long hauls. We can get into that. I LOVE teaching, and more than that, I love being a Doula, hold a space, to enter, and then wash out and give. I want to sit with a group of people and spark, get some buoyancy, floating action. We’ll push each other, activate the space, through conversation, through sharing our work, individually and collectively. I’m going to aim for growth on all our parts, some completion, and some incompletion, un-completion.
Application Requirements:
1. One page of writing about where you are at this moment, post-Covid, what is your life like, as an artist, as a human, right now.
2. One scanned or photographed handwritten page of “morning pages”. See here: https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/
3. A video of any length (can be shot on anything, phone, laptop, etc., technical quality of the video is not important) where you primarily describe to me what you wish to get out of this residency. If the video is too big to upload, please include link in a .doc, or PDF.
4. Two files of recorded music that you’ve made/composed/improvised/initiated from within.
I’ll look over all these things to get a sense of who you are, what you’re up to, what you wish for, and see if I can be of service to that.
Residency Fee: Waived for this Residency (Includes a weekday meals and housing; does not include artist materials, transportation, or weekend meals.)
For details, please visit the mentoring artist details page.
Application fee: $25