Established in 2024, the Smithsonian Academy Orchestra brings together top early music specialists to perform classical works on period instruments under the direction of Kenneth Slowik. The ensemble will present a program of works by Haydn, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn.
The Department of Music presents Rachel Beetz, Julie Herndon, and Berglind María Tómasdóttir, in a program entitled Pareidolia Memories: Imagined faces in noises of sounds remembered. This collection of works and improvisations shared between the three musicians explores memory, recognition, time, places, people, and relationships between humans and non-humans. The works are intertwined with videos and sound interludes by Berglind Tómasdóttir reflecting on the theme in various ways.
In the spirit of armchair travelers everywhere, the Voyager Ensemble explores a new culture each year by combining standard repertoire along with a contemporary work by composers from the region, including Antonîn Dvořák, Jan Kučera, and Bedřich Smetana. This year’s concert focuses on the Czech Republic with directors Airi Yoshioka (violin) and David Yang (viola) joined by eminent musicians Li-Mei Liang (violin) and Summer Hu (cello).
Jelani Cobb’s riveting, hopeful keynotes are up-to-the-moment meditations and breakdowns of the complex dynamics of race and racism in America. Whether speaking on Black Lives Matter and activism, the battle zones of Ferguson or Baltimore, the legacy of a black presidency, or the implications of the Trump era — or, more generally, on the history of civil rights, violence, and inequality in employment, housing, or incarceration in the US — Cobb speaks with the surety and articulate passion of only our best journalists.
The Department of Music presents the UMBC Jazz Faculty Ensemble, featuring trumpeter Brent Madsen, saxophonist Matt Belzer, pianist Harry Appelman, bassist Tom Baldwin, and drummer Mark Merella. The ensemble will perform modern interpretations of classic and recent jazz compositions.
The Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC) hosts an Exploratory Research Residency that invites artists and interdisciplinary collaborators to take advantage of scholarly resources and to build partnerships at UMBC and in the Baltimore region. In 2025, CADVC hosts Tomashi Jackson’s “Pedagogy Study Hall” project as part of this program, which, in collaboration with policy analyst and economic advocate Nia Evans, will host a series of intermedia series of public discussions about investment and disinvestment in the arts and humanities, looking to Baltimore as a critical case study in grassroots organizing in a system of gross structural inequity.
In Find Your Why, presented by the Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA), Tatiana Mann will lead us to explore why we engage with our disciplines, what informs our decisions and how to light our creative fire to fuel our future success. As artists and humanists, why do we choose our career paths? Because of lucrative remuneration (supported by plentiful research grants) and a lavish lifestyle (afforded by sleepless nights working several jobs)? In pursuit of quixotic research, prestigious performances, exhibitions, publications, and accolades? Or do we choose to do what we do because at some point we couldn’t imagine a life without art, or without investigating humanity’s larger questions?
The Center for Ethics and Values holds regular public forums focusing on significant ethics issues faced by researchers across the university, by students, and more broadly by society. This event, Neuroscience, Freewill, and Moral Responsibility, moderated by Steve Yalowitz, associate professor of philosophy at UMBC, features panelists Adina Roskies, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, with an appointment in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, UC Santa Barbara, and Aaron Schurger, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology and the Brain Institute, Chapman University.
The UMBC Jazz Ensemble under the direction of Matt Belzer performs with guest artist Nicole Mitchell for a fabulous evening of jazz. An award-winning creative flutist, conceptualist and composer, Mitchell emerged from Chicago’s creative music community in the 90s, and was the former first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). With an impressive 15 year run (2010–2024) as “Top Flutist of the Year” by both Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association, she is celebrated for her development of a unique improvisational language on the flute.
The Department of Music presents the second UMBC Create Music Festival, an event that reimagines music education festivals for equity and 21st century music learning, with the collaboration of the BSO OrchKids program and several Maryland school large ensembles. Students will work with teaching artists, including Emmy-nominated composer and genre-bending violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain, Chicago-based vocal theater ensemble Artemisia Trio, multi-instrumentalist Russell Kirk, and UMBC music faculty and alumnus James Dorsey ’05.
The Baltimore Classical Guitar Society presents Made in Baltimore, featuring new works for classical guitar written by local composers commissioned by BCGS. For the 2024–2025 season, the awardees are Zhishu Chang, Zac Fick-Cambria, Antonio Sanz Escallón, and UMBC student Jack McGrath, who will write ensemble works inspired by Charm City.
In conjunction with the installation Conflux: Variation (2025) by Baltimore-region artist collective Collis Donadio, on display nightly through June 30, the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture presents a public talk featuring Shannon Collis and Liz Donadio.
Join us for a special evening with writer and actress Anna Deavere Smith in conversation with Kimberly Moffitt, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. The recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, several Obie awards, two Drama Desk awards, the George Polk Career Award in Journalism, and the Dean’s Medal from the Stanford University School of Medicine, Smith is credited with having created a new form of theater. Her plays, sometimes called “docudramas,” focus on contemporary issues from multiple points of view and are composed from excerpts of hundreds of interviews.
The Department of Music presents Pianorama, a keyboard spectacular featuring pianists Audrey Andrist, Teodora Adzharova, Hui-Chuan Chen, and Hsiao-Ying Lin, who will perform works by Ravel, Debussy, and Stravinsky.
The Department of Music presents renowned percussionist Aiyun Huang in a solo recital utilizing video and live electronics. Huang enjoys a musical life as soloist, chamber musician, researcher, teacher and producer, and has been globally recognized since winning the 2002 First Prize and Audience Prize of the Geneva International Music Competition.
