Artist Profile

Nick Ryan

Nick Ryan is a multi award winning composer, sound designer, artist and audio specialist, widely recognized as a leading thinker on the future of sound. His extensive and diverse practice, as an audio expert, sound designer and music composer involves working with film, motion graphics, animation, TV drama and documentary, interactive media, technology innovation, instrument making and orchestral ensemble. Among his awards are a BAFTA for Technical Innovation, a Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel for sound editing, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Sound and an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Plymouth University.

As a practitioner and thinker he has worked with organizations throughout the world such as The MIT Media Lab, The BANFF Centre for the Arts, The Montreal Film Festival, Screen Australia, The European Broadcasting Union, The BFI, BAFTA, TEDx, Aldeburgh Music, The Royal Institution, Tate, BBC Research and Development and UK Government Department of Trade and Industry.

Nick established the studio, based at Somerset House Studios in London, as a high-end music and sound design practice with the core mission of creating experiences that push the boundaries of listening and engage new audiences with audio. It delivers many kinds of work, from award winning feature film scores and sound design, avant-garde sound installations and bespoke museum projects to audio concepts for major products and brands. The studio operates a small and agile internal team and with our large network of highly specialized associates is able to rapidly mobilize delivery of a wide variety of projects from the highly focussed to the large scale.

Visual Designer

Kameron Neal

Kameron Neal is a multidisciplinary artist working in video, performance, and design. He uses technology as a tool to encode history and craft compelling performances of self. A Princess Grace Awardee, NYU ITP Fellow and NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, Kameron is currently a Public Artist in Residence in the NYC Department of Records where he is researching new ways to engage with the city’s municipal archives. He recently directed Whiteness: Part One, an immersive 360° video cantata in collaboration with Paul Pinto that was presented at CultureHub and La MaMa. In 2020, he co-created MukhAgni with Shayok Misha Chowdhury, an irreverent multimedia performance memoir that was presented at Under the Radar. His work has been featured in music videos and performances by Billy Porter and Rufus Wainwright. Kameron’s work has been written about Forbes, The New York Times, National Geographic, HYPEBEAST and presented by a variety of institutions including The Public Theater, BAM, Ars Nova, SohoRep, Digital Graffiti, New Orleans Film Festival, the Williams College Museum of Art and SoundScene at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.

Scientist

Dr. Michelle Fournet

Dr. Michelle Fournet leads the Marine Bioacoustics and Behavior Lab (“Sea BABEL”) at the University of New Hampshire where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Acoustic Ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences. She also serves as the Associate Director for Education for the UNH Center for Acoustics Research and Education (CARE) and as the director of the Sound Science Research Collective (Sound Science), a conservation non-profit based on bioacoustics research. As a marine acoustic ecologist, Dr. Fournet uses sound to investigate questions of ecological importance in the aquatic environment. This includes investigating how marine organisms use sound to facilitate vital life functions (animal communication), as well as investigating the potential impact of noise and climate

change on marine species (anthropogenic impacts), and how sound can be used as an indicator of ecosystem health (acoustic indicators). She is particularly interested in using bioacoustics as a tool to further conservation and to assess species’ resilience to a rapidly changing ocean. Much of her research investigates calling behavior in Alaskan humpback whales, as well as the impact of climate change on Arctic seals and bowhead whales, and also studies invertebrates and fishes. Dr. Fournet has a bachelor of fine arts in theater and was a playwright and creative writer before becoming a research scientist. Her field work is the subject of the much acclaimed film Fathom, produced and distributed by Apple+ Films.

Scientist

Dr. Wendy Erb

Dr. Wendy Erb is a biological anthropologist and behavioral ecologist who studies the ecological, social, and physiological influences on the behavioral and reproductive strategies of wild primates. Her collaborative research program spans ecology, bioacoustics, anthropology, and conservation, tied together by a deep interest in how primate populations and human-wildlife relationships are responding to social-ecological change. With her research teams, she has compiled multi-year behavior, ranging, and sound-recording datasets for simakobu (Simias concolor), tamarins (Leontocebus weddelli), and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii) as well as soundscape recordings of peat, heath, and mixed-swamp forests in Borneo. As a Postdoctoral Associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, she is leading a team of natural and social scientists – in collaboration with local partners – to conduct social-ecological research across Indonesia’s planned new capital city location in Borneo. With support from Cornell University’s Migration Initiative and the Fulbright Scholar Program, they are seeking to understand the wide-ranging impacts on forests, communities, and biodiversity by combining bioacoustics and ethnographic approaches. In 2015, with Dr. Erin Vogel, Dr. Erb co-founded the non-profit organization CORE Borneo to support orangutan conservation. She is a former fellow of the Fulbright Program (Senior Scholar to Indonesia 2016-2017), British Academy (Visiting Fellow 2018), American Institute for Indonesian Studies (AIFIS-Luce Fellow 2018-2019), and American Association of University Women (Postdoctoral Fellow 2019-1020).

Scientist

Dr. Vijay Ramesh

Dr. Vijay Ramesh Dr. Ramesh is a postdoctoral research fellow at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. His research is focused on understanding how the environment shapes the ecology and behavior of tropical montane birds. Dr. Ramesh uses an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach that borrows from conservation bioacoustics, citizen science, and historical ecology. Specifically, he studies the role of climate and habitat in structuring bird communities of the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot. Previously, his work incorporating acoustic data showed how bird species have responded to ecological restoration. Additionally, he has worked with eBird data and historical datasets of species occurrence to identify how birds have responded to a century of global change. As a postdoctoral fellow, he explores how the environment—specifically, climate and vegetation structure—drives bird community assembly and acoustic structure along an elevational gradient in the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot.

Artistic Director

Kay Matschullat

Kay Matschullat originates, produces and directs performances around the globe. She has directed premieres of plays by Nobel prize-winning Caribbean playwright Derek Walcott, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Ariel Dorfman and Playwright President Vaclav Havel. Other credits include Threepenny Opera, Carson McCullers Talks About Love, (nominated for a Drama Desk Award) off-Broadway with composer Duncan Sheik, Echoes of A Thousand Hills with Masharika Theater in Rwanda, Pantomime, Dimetos, and Widows at Williamstown Theater, All’s Well The Ends Well, Love’s Labours Lost, and Skin of Our Teeth.    

Since founding MAXlive, she has produced the multi-venue biennial festivals MAXlive 2019:  A Space Festival, the inaugural MAXlive festival in San Francisco creating collaborations between scientists and performers, MAXlive 2021, The Neuroverse pushing the limits of intelligence and investigating applications of AI in performance, and MAXlive 2023 Where is My Body – dance music and immersive performance exploring the changing nature of embodiment.  Partners include Carnegie Hall, The Exploratorium, MASS MoCA, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, The Museum of Science (Boston), California Academy of Science, and Highland Center for the Arts. 

She has held artistic residencies at Dartmouth College, Harvard College, Calarts, and SCAD.  She served as a full time faculty member at Tisch School of the Arts for over two decades, taught at Princeton University Program in Theater and Dance and is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard College.  

Grants include an NEA Fellowship, A TCG Fellowship, and a Drama League residency. She founded Scriptopia, the first online collaborative tool for play development. She looks forward to seeing you at MAXlive.