Techne was founded in 2010 by Bonnie Jones and Suzanne Thorpe, educators and musicians active in electronic music communities in the US and abroad. In the past several years, our team has  expanded to include an exceptional group of musicians, educators, curators, and activists.

Suzanne Thorpe is a composer/performer, researcher and educator who lives on the bank of the Hudson river, at the foot of the Catskill mountains. She creates compositions with a variety of media and technology, and performs electroacoustic flute. Her career as a professional recording artist began as a founding member of the critically acclaimed band Mercury Rev, with whom she toured and produced a number of recordings for Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet and more. As an electro-acoustic improvisor she’s performed with an inspiring array of musicians, and as a performer she has appeared internationally. Her compositions tend to be site-specific works that highlight her interest in sound’s contributions to our knowledge of each other and our environments. The results are dynamic sound installations and performances that evolve with participants and their surroundings. 

Thorpe’s research is broadly concerned with contemporary sound studies, with particular attention to sound art, electronic music, listening and performance. Through an interdisciplinary method that combines creative practice with feminist and ecological theory, her research is focused on performances that emphasize principles of inclusion, speculation and coalition building.  

Thorpe holds an MFA in Electronic Music & Media from Mills College, and a Ph.D. in Integrative Studies from the University of California, San Diego. She is also a Deep Listening instructor, having studied in depth with American composer and Deep Listening founder Pauline Oliveros. She has been the recipient of the Frog Peak Collective Award for innovative research in technology, as well as grants from Harvestworks Digital Media Foundation, New Music USA, and the MAP Fund. She is currently a Mellon Teaching Fellow​/Lecturer in Music at Columbia University.  http://www.suzannethorpe.com/

Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and educator working primarily with electronic sound and text. Her work explores noise, sonic identity, listening, and sound as knowledge.

Jones has been an active improvising musician since 1999, and has released several recordings of collaborative and solo projects including green just as I could see (Erstwhile, 2012), with Andrea Neumann; AS:IS (Olof Bright, 2012), with Christine Abdelnour and Andrea Neumann; Clandestine Cassette Series #2 (Northern Spy, 2011). She has received commissions from the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, United Kingdom, and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and has presented her work nationally and internationally.

As a Baltimore-based arts organizer, Jones was a founding member of both the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery, and is a member of the High Zero Festival and of the Red Room collective.

Jones received her M.F.A. at Bard College and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Born in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland and Providence RI on the lands of the Susquehannock, Piscataway, Algonquian, and Narrangansett. https://bonnie-jones.com/

Asha Tamirisa is a multimedia artist and researcher based in Portland, Maine, USA. Asha has performed at venues such as the ICA Boston, Bitforms Gallery (NYC), has given talks at the University of Michigan, Mount Holyoke College, Oberlin College, and Wheaton College, and held residencies at The Media Archeology Lab (Boulder, CO), Perte de Signal (Montreal, CA) and I-Park Foundation (East Haddam, CT). Asha’s work has been mentioned in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics and the 5th Edition of Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture. Along with many colleagues, Asha co-founded OPENSIGNAL, a collective of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic music and art practice. Asha has taught at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, RIOT Rhode Island (formerly Girls Rock! Rhode Island), and Street Level Youth Media in Chicago, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Bates College.

Katherine Young makes electroacoustic music and sonic art using expressive noises, curious timbres, and kinetic structures to explore the dramatic physicality of sound, shifting interpersonal dynamics, and tensions between the familiar and the strange. The LAPhil, Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Dal Niente, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, Spektral Quartet, Weston Olencki, Fonema Consort, and others have commissioned her music. She has also worked closely with Wet Ink, Ensemble Nikel, WasteLAnd and RAGE Thormbones, Distractfold Ensemble’s Linda Jankowska, Callithumpian Ensemble, and Yarn/Wire. Her installation work has been commissioned by the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art.

As a bassoonist and improviser, Katherine amplifies her instrument and employs a flexible electronics setup. Her debut solo album garnered praise in The Wire (“Bassoon colossus”) and Downbeat (“seriously bold leaps for the bassoon”). Collaboration and relationship building is central to her practice, and she performs regularly as a soloist, in ad hoc improvised groups, and with projects such as Beautifulish (duo with Sam Scranton), Pretty Monsters, Architeuthis Walks on Land (duo with Amy Cimini). She has documented her work on numerous recordings, including her quartet Pretty Monsters self-titled debut, a duo recording with Anthony Braxton, and the multi-movement work Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight (Parlour Tapes+) created with violinist Austin Wulliman. As a scholar, Katherine researches the incorporation of DIY electronics and improvisation in contemporary notated music and opera, particularly Anthony Braxton’s operatic work. As an educator, Katherine has taught composition, electronic music, and improvisation at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Berklee College of Music. In fall 2020 she joined the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta. In 2016, after the birth of her son and the election of Trump, she was thrilled to join forces with TECHNE.

Board Members: 

Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud is an accomplished artist and writer exploring themes such as mapping, nature, sensation, and diaspora in her work. She also oversees program initiatives at nonprofits with a focus on community-building, sustainability, and creativity. Currently, she is director of education and public programs at the Houston Botanic Garden, creating the organization’s first-ever public programs which will link plants/nature, people and culture. She has led outreach and program development at University of Houston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Project Row Houses, among others. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago participated in exhibitions and residencies throughout the Americas in the U.S., Caribbean, and Latin America.

Christina Zafiris has been a supporter of music and proponent of independent business strategies throughout her career. After graduating from University of California at Santa Barbara with a B.A. in Economics she focused on marketing for influential record labels such as Matador Records, TVT Records and Ryko/Warner Music Group. Christina is currently VP of Finance at an independent ad agency, and looks forward to working with TECHNE, which she has admired from its inception.

Richard Kamerman is a musician, composer and curator active in performance art, noise and other improvised and experimental music settings since the early 2000s, primarily working with networks of feedback electronics, percussion instruments and storytelling forms. His work is preoccupied with themes of amplification, magnification, obfuscation, system design, game theory, patterns, human error, accident and failure. Richard has performed throughout the United States as well as internationally in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Australia. Recordings of his solo or collaborative works have been released by Erstwhile Records, Pilgrim Talk, Contour Editions, RRRecords and Engraved Glass, among others. Richard is a co-founding curator of Queer Trash, a roving performance art series based in NYC designed to serve as a dedicated platform for providing visibility to work emerging from LGBTQ++ communities and challenging experimental performance aesthetics and practices, for which they were awarded the 2018 Issue Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship. From 2009 to 2017, he also actively operated the small-press music label Copy For Your Records.