Speakers

Ken Ueno is a composer, performer, sound artist, and scholar. Leading performers and ensembles around the world have championed his music. Ken’s piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. As a vocalist, Ueno is known for his bespoke extended techniques and has performed his vocal concerto with major orchestras such as the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Warsaw Philharmonic, and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra. He has collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Du Yun, and Tyshawn Sorey, among others, and maintains ongoing projects with artists like Kung Chi Shing, Viola Yip, Matt Ingalls, and Karen Yu. Ueno’s sound art installations have been exhibited worldwide, including at Art Basel, the Taipei Modern Art Museum, and the New Vision Arts Festival. His large-scale installation, Daedalus Drones, a fence-labyrinth with a nest of flying drones, was installed and premiered at the Asia Society Hong Kong in 2021. Last summer, he was a featured artist on the Noise Fest, curated by the West Kowloon Cultural Center in Hong Kong. Last September, he was the featured guest composers at the Takefu International Music Festival, where the Arditti String Quartet premiered his latest string quartet. On that occasion, Toshiya Suzuki, premiered Ueno’s concerto for bass recorder. Most recently, in April 2025, Ueno was a featured performer at A Bunch of Noise, Shanghai’s leading noise music festival. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His writings have appeared in the Oxford Handbook, The New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, The Drama Review (TDR), Ethic Press, and Wiley & Sons. His biography is included in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

www.kenueno.com

Mercedes Montemayor is a Mexican composer and a first-year DMA student at Stanford University. Drawing inspiration from textures and her amateur painting practice, she is constantly exploring ways to translate the physicality of light into the sonic spectrum—and vice versa. Her works carry a deep emotional resonance, often blending abstract concepts with personal expression. She enjoys experimenting with the fractal nature of sketching and incorporates clean separation in her mixes.

In addition to her composition work, Mercedes performed at Mutek Mexico 2023 alongside artists such as William Basinski, Marina Herlop, and Hatus Noit. She also interned at WSDG, an architectural acoustics firm, in the same year. Outside of music, she enjoys reading about psychology, the philosophy of logic, and mixing and mastering techniques; and watching films by Dogme 95 directors and Jim Jarmusch.

Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is an Iranian composer and performer. She writes for hybrid instrumental/electronic ensembles, creates electroacoustic and audiovisual works, builds instruments, and performs electronic music. She explores the unfamiliar familiar while being motivated by musical extremes; finding ways to play with various musical thresholds is something that she is currently attracted to. 

Being a cross-disciplinary artist, she has actively collaborated on projects evolving around dance, film, and theater. She is the co-founder and producer of Fashion x Electronics, a collective focused on creating interdisciplinary works based on fashion and electronic music. Kimia’s work has been showcased by organizations across the globe and her work has been performed internationally. She is currently pursuing her DMA in Music Composition at Stanford University.

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Kayla Yazdi is an Iranian-Canadian wearable art designer. After moving from Iran to Canada, she expanded her artistic practice by earning a Bachelor of Design in Fashion Design & Technology and gained valuable experience working with apparel companies such as Gentle Fawn and Lace Embrace, where she served as a technical developer. She has also been an artist in residence at Cortex Frontal in Portugal, Château Orquevaux in France, and Domaine de Boisbuchet in France.

Kayla is the co-producer and creative director of Fashion X Electronics, a multidisciplinary collective that merges fashion, music, technology, and other artistic disciplines. Her work is driven by a passion for experimentation and a deep desire to express individuality through fashion as abstract but functional art. She is motivated by the challenge of pushing boundaries within the fashion industry, often blurring the line between production and visual art by transforming garments into installations and wearable art.

Kayla is also deeply committed to collaboration, believing it fosters creative discovery and innovation. Working with others allows her to think on a larger scale while cultivating a community that thrives on the exchange of knowledge and skills.

Seán Ó Dálaigh is a composer and sound artist from Kerry, Ireland. His music is primarily concerned with space, silence, and the physicality of sound production. His practice includes writing for ensembles and musicians; electronic music; composing for, collaborating with, and performing in contemporary theatre and dance works; and sonic installations incorporating sculptural elements. He is represented by the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland (CMC). He is currently a DMA student in composition at Stanford University and CCRMA.

Walker Smith is a first-year CCRMA Ph.D. student and an aspiring “musical chemist.” Regularly appearing in rainbow suits as his performance alter-ego “Roy G. Biv,” he explores connections between science and sound, music and molecules, color and composition. Using data sonification to transform the visible spectra of chemical elements into sounds, he guides audiences through dynamic audiovisual tours of molecular soundscapes. While continuing to explore the intersections of chemistry and music through developing his audiovisual software instrument ‘the Interactive Musical Periodic Table,’ he is also exploring other aspects of color, multimedia, and performance through experimental and often theatrical compositions. He is currently working on a multimedia show titled the “Stanford Prism Experiment,” an ongoing collaboration with Héloïse Garry exploring colors and other things. Before beginning his PhD in Computer-Based Music Theory and Acoustics at Stanford, Walker earned dual bachelor’s degrees in music composition and chemistry from Indiana University Bloomington and completed a Fulbright at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, Netherlands.

John Fath is a first-year PhD Student in Ethnomusicology at Stanford’s Department of Music. His research interests center around contemporary jazz fusion and hip-hop in the UK, but he has completed projects that broadly consider jazz since 1960. Before arriving at Stanford, John completed a BA in Music and Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, worked for the Great 78 Project, and taught high school biology and psychology. John is also a musician who enjoys learning new instruments but mostly plays double bass in jazz and related idioms.

Summer Krinsky is a Detroit based composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, audio engineer, creative coder and multimedia installation artist. She creates distinctive music, characterized by poppy vocals mingling with bizarre ostinatos, polyrhythmic breakbeats, and ethereal soundscapes. Krinsky is captivated by fathoming new compositional frontiers, making art that embodies nowness through examining the intermediary role technology plays in modern identity. Exploring themes of this cyborg era, her sonic sandbox resides at the edge between live instrumentation and contemporary electronics. Krinsky is a recipient of the 2024 Knight New Work grant, 2022 Kresge Fellowship, OneBeat Fellowship, and is a 2023 Radiona Artist-In-Residence. She experiments with programming novel audio controllers and designing interactive installations which have been commissioned and exhibited by organizations including Science Gallery, Church of Noise, and CultureSource. Krinsky releases music under the artist name Summer Like The Season.