Mark DeChiazza

Mark DeChiazzais a director, filmmaker, designer, and choreographer. Many of his projects explore interactions between music performance and media to discover new expressive possibilities. His work can bring together composers, ensemble and musicians with visual artists, dancers, music ensembles, and makers of all types. Called“wildly imaginative” and “a tour de force” by the Washington Post, Columbine’s Paradise Theater, his music-theater collaboration with composer Amy Beth Kirsten, continues a relationship with multiple-Grammy winning ensemble eighth blackbird that began in 2009 with his acclaimed production of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. In 2014, Kirsten and DeChiazza founded Howl, an artists collective to aid the creation of interdisciplinary music work, and they join forces again for the creation of Quixote, a theatrical work for three singers and four percussionists produced by Montclair State’s Peak Performances to premiere in March 2017. Other recent projects include choreography and design for Pulitzer-winning composer John Luther Adams’ Sila, a massive site-determined piece for 80 musicians commissioned by Lincoln Center, video projection design for Visitations: Theotokia and The War Reporter, two new operas by Jonathan Berger and presented by Stanford Live and Prototype Festival in New York City, and directing a staged concert of Missy Mazzoli’s work for Young People’s Chorus of NYC and Mazzoli’s band Victoire (DeChiazza is currently directing a video for the band’s upcoming new album Vespers for a New Dark Age). DeChiazza’s film A Colloquy with God, made for New York Polyphony, was featured on NPR Music as was his interpretive concert video for So Percussion, It Is Time. American Composers Orchestra and The Crossing premiered his film for Amy Beth Kirsten’s strange pilgrims premiered by at Carnegie Hall in February 2014.Additional upcoming projects include direction, video projection and set design for 5 Beasts, a music theater work featuring singer/actor Rinde Eckert, musican/composer Ned Rothenberg and human beat-boxer Adam Matta, that will premiere at Les Subsistance in Lyon France. ORPHEUS UNSUNG: an opera for electric guitar, a large-scale film and music performance work, is his latest collaboration with Grammy winning composer Steven Mackey, which will premiere in 2016.