Fuse Ensemble unEarthed Season

Artist Collaborators - Spring 2026

Sarah Aha, visual artist

Award-winning conceptual fine art photographer Sarah Aha’s work transforms imagination and emotion into visual narratives. Her background in Theater Arts and over a decade studying diverse dance forms inform her love of movement and the human form in synchronicity with nature. This dynamic foundation allows her to capture a deep connection between human presence and the spirit of the natural world.

Often the subject of her own lens, Sarah creates self-portraits and conceptual images that externalize her inner landscapes. Using a camera (and sometimes a drone) as her guide, she collects original photographs through travels and collaborations, weaving these elements into meticulously crafted composite images. Each piece integrates evocative colors, textures, and personal symbolism, inviting viewers into a layered experience of the world as both familiar and dreamlike.

Sarah’s mission is to expand our sense of self to embrace all forms of life, bridging the gap between self-discovery and connection to the world. Through her art, she invites us to see exploration of the self as a pathway to belonging, where each discovery connects rather than isolates us.

Gina Biver

Deemed a “musical force of nature” by Gramophone, composer Gina Biver is the founder/director of Fuse Ensemble. Much of her work involves acoustic instruments, electronics, intermedia, and the crossing of boundaries between art forms coalescing into a unified conceptual model. Her work is inspired by the written word and by visual art, both static and moving, as she collaborates with filmmakers, choreographers, poets, media artists, sculptors, and painters.

I Care If You Listen stated that “Biver creates a playground for internal exploration that is both fascinating and deeply effective.” Her work has been presented in the US, Europe, Australia, Canada and Mexico. A champion of new music, with her group Fuse Ensemble she has premiered and performed numerous works by living composers since 2008.

Matthew Burtner www.matthewburtner.com is an Alaskan-born composer, sound artist and eco-acoustician whose work explores embodiment, ecology, polytemporality and noise. His music has been performed in concerts around the world and featured by organizations such as NASA, PBS NewsHour, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the BBC, the U.S. State Department under President Obama, and National Geographic. He has published three intermedia climate change works including the IDEA Award-winning telematic opera, Auksalaq.  In 2020 he received an Emmy Award for “Composing Music with Snow and Glaciers” a feature on his Glacier Music by Alaska Public Media. His music has also received international honors and awards from the Musica Nova (Czech Republic), Bourges (France), Gaudeamus (Netherlands), Darmstadt (Germany), and The Russolo (Italy) international music competitions. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award for The Ceiling Floats Away, a large-scale collaborative work with US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Rita Dove. Burtner holds the position of Eleanor Shea Professor of Music at the University of Virginia (www.virginia.edu) where he Co-Directs the Coastal Future Conservatory (http://www.coastalconservatory.org). He also is founder and director of the Alaska-based environmental music non-profit organization EcoSono (www.ecosono.org). His new album Icefield is out now on Ravello Records.

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Jessie Montgomery

Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life,” (The Washington Post) and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence. She was named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year.
Montgomery’s music contains a breadth of musical depictions of the human experience—from statements on social justice themes, to the Black diasporic experience and its foundation in American music, to wistful adorations and playful spontaneity—reflective of her deeply rooted experience as a classical violinist and child of the radical New York City cultural scene of the 1980s and 90s. From choral-symphonic works such as I Have Something To Say (2019), to her more intimate solo instrumental works, she presents a fresh perspective on the contemporary concert music experience. In response to Montgomery’s GRAMMY®-winning work, Rounds (2021), San Francisco’s NPR station KQED stated: “this is what classical music needs in 2024.”

Gabriella Smith

Gabriella Smith is a composer whose work invites listeners to find joy in climate action. Her music comes from a love of play, exploring new instrumental sounds, and creating musical arcs that transport audiences into sonic landscapes inspired by the natural world. An “outright sensation” (LA Times), her music "exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy” (NY Times).

Lost Coast, a concerto for cello and orchestra, written for her longtime collaborator Gabriel Cabezas, received its world premiere in May 2023 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. This work joins her organ concerto, Breathing Forests, written for James McVinnie also premiered by the LA Phil, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Other current projects include a large-scale work for Kronos Quartet, commissioned in celebration of their 50th anniversary season, and an album-length work for yMusic featuring underwater field recordings. In December 2023, her work Tumblebird Contrails was performed on the Nobel Prize Concert by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Her first full-length album, titled Lost Coast, was recorded with Gabriel Cabezas and producer Nadia Sirota at Greenhouse Studios in Iceland and named one of NPR Music’s “26 Favorite Albums Of 2021” and a “Classical Album to Hear Right Now” by The New York Times. Gabriel and Gabriella, as a cello-violin-voice-electronics duo, have performed together around the world, including in Reykjavík, New York City, and Paris.