Commissioned Artists
Eisa Davis
It all begins with an idea. Eisa Davis is an award-winning performer, writer, musician and composer working in multiple aesthetics on stage and screen. Stageworks include the Pulitzer Prize finalist Bulrusher, her stage memoir Angela's Mixtape, and the score for Devil In A Blue Dress: The Musical. This September, her performance piece The Essentialisn't will premiere at HERE, and in the spring, her new play ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| will premiere in a co-production between ACT and the Vineyard Theatre. She has released two albums of original music, Something Else and Tinctures (with Daniel T. Denver), and co-created the Warriors concept album with Lin-Manuel Miranda. Notable performance work includes Kindred, Mare of Easttown, The Wire, Relay, Ex-Husbands, Kings, Preludes, This, the musical of The Secret Life of Bees, and Passing Strange. Eisa lives in Brooklyn, NY.
martha redbone
“We are the underdog, we’re the fighters getting ready for the next round…”
Martha Redbone is an American vocalist, songwriter, composer, educator, and United States Artist Fellow, celebrated for her “brilliant collision of cultures” (The New Yorker), embodying the folk and mountain blues sounds of her childhood in “Coal country” Harlan County, Kentucky with the eclectic grit of her teenage years in pre-gentrified Brooklyn. With music that celebrates her Southeastern Indigenous and African American culture, Martha broadens the boundaries of American Roots music. Songs and storytelling share her life experience as an Afro-Indigenous woman in an ever-changing world. Working in partnership with longtime collaborator Aaron Whitby, their works include Original Music and Score for the 2022 Broadway revival “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuff, Ntozake Shange and 2020 Drama Desk Award- Outstanding Composer in a Play, Public Theater, NYC. Their musical works uplift issues of social justice, connecting cultures and celebrating the human spirit.
Sxip Shirey
Sxip Shirey is an international composer, producer, sound artist, and sonic pioneer. His compositions, performances and curated evenings “Sxip’s Hour of Charm” established him as a fixture in New York’s underground art scene and internationally. He makes music, sound design and Foley for theater, dance and film. His community-inclusive, immersive choral works, "The Gauntlet," developed with Coco Karol, have been created for Rockefeller Center, The Sydney Opera House, Bard College, Friends of the Highline, Cleveland Museum of Art, and virtually in 3D immersive sound for NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center. He is a collaborator of singer, scholar, and song composer Rhiannon Giddens, and released tracks together that include “All Babies Must Cry,” “Woman of Constant Sorrow,” and “Just the Two of Us.”