Performing arts

Katinka Kleijn

Katinka Kleijn is a Dutch-born cellist and interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves between improvisation, composition, and performance art. Classically trained, she places the cello in unexpected contexts to explore relationships between instrument and body, sound and environment, performer and audience. Her work has involved submerged cellos, shared electrical circuits, brainwaves, film, and collective improvisation.

A member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble, Kleijn has performed as a soloist with major orchestras and presented work at Lincoln Center, the Library of Congress, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. The New York Times has called her "a player of formidable expressive gifts."

Carn Crua

Carla Romero Sans, known as Carn Crua, is a Barcelona-born performer, actress, singer, and songwriter whose work moves freely between music, poetry, theatre, and performance. Working with voice and a loop station, she constructs layered compositions live, building rhythm, language, song, and theatrical gesture into performances that unfold in the moment.

Across more than twenty years, Carn Crua has performed throughout Spain and Mexico, from experimental music and independent performance to cabaret and contemporary dance. She has appeared in productions by La Veronal and collaborated with electronic music producer Yulia Niko on Fire In My Soul. Her practice is rooted in improvisation and transformation, with the stage as a place where music, character, and performance continually reshape one another.

Rebekah Heller

Rebekah Heller is a virtuosic bassoonist, conductor, and composer who has spent her career reconsidering what a bassoonist can be. Stepping away from a conventional orchestral path, she built a practice around living composers, commissioning, improvisation, and experimentation, treating the bassoon as territory still open to discovery. Her work moves through electronics, ensemble, and performance, at times incorporating space, memory, clothing, and light to expand how the instrument can be played, heard, and encountered.

Heller has appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Nagoya Philharmonic, and New World Symphony. The New Yorker has called her "an impressive solo bassoonist," and The New York Times has praised her "flair." A longtime member and Co-Artistic Director Emerita of the International Contemporary Ensemble, she has helped bring hundreds of new works into being. She teaches bassoon and improvisation at Mannes School of Music at The New School. Her 2026 album, Righteous Rage, pushes further into the possibilities of an instrument she continues to reinvent.