People
Photo of Bombay Rickey by Cory Weaver
Kristin Marting, Founding Director
is HERE’s Founding Artistic Director and a director of hybrid work based in NYC. She cultivates artists and programs all events for two performance spaces for an annual audience of 30,000. She co-created and curates HERE’s Artist Residency Program. Under her leadership, HERE has garnered sixteen OBIE Awards, two OBIE Grants and a CUNY Booth Award for artistic achievement, two Berilla Kerr Awards, four NY Innovative Theatre Awards, two Bessie Awards, one Pulitzer nomination, six Drama Desk nominations, two MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowships and most recently, seven Tony nominations. She has created and directed 29 works for the stage (nine original hybrid works, six opera-theatre and music-theatre works, nine adaptations of novels & short stories and five classic plays) and is currently developing Looking at You with Kamala Sankaram and Rob Handel. Other recent projects include Silent Voices at BAM, Assembled Identity with Purva Bedi and Mariana Newhard, IDIOT with Robert Lyons; and Bombay Rickey, an opera cabaret also in PROTOTYPE. She has lectured and been a guest artist at Bard College, Brown University, Columbia University, Harvard University, NYU and Williams College. She regularly serves on grant panels for TCG, DCA, NEA and NYSCA, among others. She was recently named a nytheatre.com Person of the Decade for outstanding contribution, a Leader to Watch by Art Table, and honored with a BAX10 Award.
Beth Morrison, Founding Director
Recipient of the Musical America Award for Best Artist of the Year as Agent of Change and noted as a “contemporary opera mastermind” (LA Times) and “a powerhouse leading the industry to new heights” (WQXR), Beth Morrison is an opera-theatre producer and the President and Creative Producer of Beth Morrison Projects. Beth created Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) in 2006 to identify and support the work of emerging and established living composers. BMP is celebrated as an industry disruptor and tastemaker at the forefront of musical and theatrical innovation by commissioning, developing, producing and touring the groundbreaking new works of these living composers and their collaborators, which take the form of opera-theatre, music-theatre, and vocal-theatre. BMP encourages risk-taking and the result is provocative works that represent a dynamic and lasting legacy for a new American canon. Opera News has noted: “More than any other figure in the opera industry, Beth Morrison has helped propel the art form into the twenty-first century.” In 2013 Beth co-founded the PROTOTYPE Festival with HERE, which has become “essential to the evolution of American opera.” (New Yorker). Beth served a founding tenure as Producer for the Yale Institute for Music Theatre, as well as Producer for New York City Opera’s VOX: Contemporary American Opera Lab. She first honed her management skills as the Administrative Director for the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. She is currently an advisory board member of National Sawdust and Brooklyn Youth Chorus, as well as a board member of Opera America, the international competition, Music Theatre Now and Voices 21C, a social justice choir. Morrison is frequently asked to give lectures at conservatories across the country, including Yale, Mannes School of Music, NYU, Manhattan School of Music, Arizona State University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and more. Morrison is also in demand as a speaker both nationally and internationally and has delivered key note speeches for Classical:Next and Opera Europa among others. Morrison holds a Bachelor of Music from Boston University, a Master of Music from Arizona State University, and an MFA from Yale School of Drama.
Du Yun, Co-curator
Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai, China, currently based in New York City, is a composer, performer, advocator, working at the intersection of orchestral, opera, theatre, chamber music, cabaret, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics and noise. She has been hailed by the New York Times as a groundbreaking artist, listed by the Washington Post as one of their Top 35 female composers, and selected by Rolling Stone Italia in its decade review as one of the composers who defined the 2010s. Her body of work is championed by some of today’s finest performing groups and organizations around the world. Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker), Du Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize (libretto by Royce Vavrek). Her collaborative opera with Raven Chacon Sweet Land won the 2020 Best New Opera by the Music Critics Association of North America. Other notable recognitions include Guggenheim, American Academy Berlin Prize, Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grammys nomination in Best Classical Music Composition (Air Glow), Moscow’s BraVo Award (best classical composition, The Veronica), shortlist for UK’s Royal Philharmonic Society’s 2021 Best Small Chamber Works (Every Grass a Spring). Her four studio albums were a New Yorker Notable Recording of Year in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021 respectively. Her latest monodrama opera In Our Daughter’s Eyes was a notable performance of the year in 2022 by the New Yorker.
Du Yun is Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. As a curator and advocator for new music and art, she was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), artistic director of MATA festival (2014-2018), founded a FutureTradition initiative championing collaborations in oral tradition practices from ground up, and served as a curator-advisor for European’s Festival Alliances. She was Artist of the Year at the Beijing Music Festival in 2019, and the Asia Society in Hong Kong has honored her for her continued contributions to performing arts. The Carnegie Foundation and the Vilcek Prize in Music have honored her as an immigrant who have made lasting contributions to the American society. In 2023 Harvard University honored her as centennial medalist, the highest recognition for its alumni.
Du Yun is also very proud of her own band, Ok Miss. Some of the most rewarding projects with the band include a multi-year initiative with the First Generation School Children in Yushu, Tibetan Prefecture, where collaborations with the local musicians see the fruitions of education, re-imagination, and the publications of the local oral traditions.
*Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone and In Our Daughter’s Eyes were both a Beth Morrison Projects Commission and Prototype Festival premieres.*
PROTOTYPE IS CO-PRODUCED BY:
Prototype Staff
Kristin Marting
Beth Morrison
Du Yun
Kim Whitener
Sarah Bellin
Julia Mendes
Zach Jenkins
Maeve Chapman
Leah Podzimek
Rachel Leighson
OPEN
Unison Media, Andrew Ousley
Cecily Rea, Christina Goslin, Clara Livingston, Dana Freeman, Eilyn Hammer, Esmerelda Cuautle, Jasmine Galante, Julia Little, Kelton DuMont, Landon Wilson
Beth Morrison
Sam Linden
Roderick Murray
Victoria Voketaitis
Kendra Wieneke
Liz Uchtman
Julia Mendes
Betsy Podsiadlo
Melanie Holm
Noel Holloway
Patty TBD
Mia Kong
Cynthia Bastidas
Eboni Flowers
Kristin Marting
Amanda Szeglowski
Remi Harris
Sungah Han
Andy Lynn
Haley Fragen
Kamila Slawinski
Sonia Kiran
Chiaoyi Chang
Cole Bonenberger
Alex White
Brandon Schock
Richard Stauffacher
Charles Shipman
Nathaniel Claridad
Leadership Circle
Michael Champness (Treasurer)
Abigail Gampel
Umar Haider
Tim Maner
Kristin Marting (Founding Artistic Director)
Kevin Matthews (Vice Chair)
Helen Mills
Alan Ostroff
Paul Pinto
Kamala Sankaram (Secretary)
Amy Segal
Robert Walport
Jennifer Suh Whitfield (Chair)
Tommy Young
Barbara Busackino (Ex-Officio)
Tony Barkan (Board Emeritus)
Jason Baruch (Board Emeritus)
Jamie Bennett (Board Emeritus)
Bethany Haynes (Board Emeritus)
Nancy Sanders (Board Chair)
Beth Morrison (President)
Dr. Michael Siegal, M.D., Ph.D (Vice Chair)
Richard Ellingsen (Vice Chair)
Miles Benickes (Treasurer)
Charlotte Issacs (Secretary)
Kiki Ramos Gindler
Mark Wanek
Scott Lord
Helen Little
Greg Spears
Ralph Dandrea
Sandy Pressman
Kamala Sankaram
Morris Robinson
Marian Godfrey
Fred Peters
Nicholas Firth
ADVISORY BOARD
Linda Brumbach
Renée Fleming
Nathan Gunn
David Howse
Collen Jennings-Rogensack
Joseph V. Melillo