User:Julia A. Miller

Julia A. Miller is a guitarist, composer, electronic musician, poet, VJ, educator and curator.

As a guitarist, Julia performs with Auris, an electroacoustic trio, and as a frequent soloist and collaborator in experimental and avant garde chamber music. Auris's current cd has been released on Artco Records (2009). Julia completed the performance half of a double MM in Classical Guitar Performance at Northwestern University in 1993, and currently serves as the Jazz, Folk and Contemporary Guitar Department Chair at the Music Institute of Chicago, where she is also a Suzuki Guitar specialist.

As a composer, Julia is active with the Chicago Composer's Consortium and New Music Chicago, and her first cd of acoustic chamber music will debut on the Southport Composer's label in 2010. Julia's music has been performed by artists including guitarist Fareed Haque, piano trio The Lincoln Trio, guitar and mandolin duo Ahlert & Schwab, and sopranos Toni Arnold and Julia Bentley, and has been featured at such festivals and venues as the Aspen Music Festival, May In Miami, the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Depaul University, Northwestern University, and Oberlin University, as well as rock clubs, cabarets, bars and alternative spaces internationally. Julia completed the composition half of a double MM at Northwestern University also in 1993, and a DMA in Composition from Northwestern University in 2005. Julia has received awards and fellowships from the Chicago Tribune Foundation, the New York Art Ensemble, the United Arts Council, the American Composer's Forum, and Meet the Composer. Julia is currently a member of the composition faculty at the Music Institute of Chicago.

As an electronic musician, Julia recently completed a sound installation for the Florasonic program at the Lincoln Park Conservatory sponsored by the Experimental Sound Studio. In 1998, Julia was a finalist for the Gaudeamus Music Week Composition Competition for the acousmatic work "bluu", and also presented that same work at the IRCAM Forum in Paris. In 2008, Julia received a premier of a new work for 5.1 DVD and video titled "artists go from unknown to mainstream overnight" at the Electronic Music Midwest Festival. Julia is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Sound and Liberal Studies at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

Poetry and the voice live at the heart of Julia's work, and poetic documents as scores, performative objects, and new media poetics are part of Julia's ongoing exploration into the hybridization of voice, instruments, electronics, and video to create an organic whole from one source of material (her voice). To this end, Julia developed two innovative courses for the School of the Art Institute: Song (Sound), and Sound Poetry (LibHum).

As a VJ, Julia was a member of Merkaba, an influential collective, and was a Board Member of the Undershorts Film Festival. Julia integrates live video performance into her poetic and musical works, triggers video with the guitar, and has VJ'd in venues such as Sonotheque, Sound Bar, and the Metro in Chicago, and at Burning Man.

For the better part of a decade, Julia has been been a curator, along with founder George Flynn and composer Jeff Kowalkowski, of the New Music at the Green Mill concert series. Additionally, Julia was instrumental in the technical organization of the Chicago Composer's Forum's productions of John Cage's Musicircus at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2005) and the Chicago Cultural Center (2007).