CompFest
Each year, Emory CompFest brings innovative national and international musicians to Emory and Atlanta. Featured artists have included Sam Pluta & Peter Evans, Natacha Diels, Timuçin Şahin, Annea Lockwood, Yarn/Wire, Nicole Mitchell, Lisa E. Harris, and others. During their residencies, the artists work with students and faculty and present their music in concert. We seek artists who work in ways that expand traditional compositional frameworks and who can offer exciting and meaningful creative exchanges with the community.
CompFest 2027
February 12–13, 2027
CompFest 2027 highlights the intersection between sound art and music in the truly electrifying creative practice of NYC-based artist Jess Rowland. On Friday February 12th at 8pm there will be an opening and activation of several of Rowland's sound art pieces, which will remain in exhibition for one month in the Emory Visual Arts Gallery. The following night, Saturday February 13th at 8pm, Rowland will lead students, faculty, and guest artists through a concert-length performance specifically designed for CompFest, invoking feedback from handmade sound art objects, musical instruments, and resonance of the Performing Arts Studio itself.
Friday, February 12, at 8PM
Saturday, February 13, at 8PM
Jess Rowland will lead students, faculty, and guest artists through a concert-length performance specifically designed for CompFest, invoking feedback from handmade sound art objects, musical instruments, and resonance of the Performing Arts Studio itself.
About the Artist: JESS ROWLAND
Jess Rowland is an artist, composer, and performer working with sound, multimedia, and experimental technologies. Her practice explores sound and light as embodied physical material - through printed circuitry, spatialized audio, electromagnetic and electroluminescent phenomena, and hybrid objects that blur composition, installation, and performance.
Jess received her MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, where she was affiliated with the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). In 2018, she was named the Peter B. Lewis Fellow in Art at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Her work has been exhibited, presented, and performed internationally, including at the Banff Centre, New York Electronic Arts Festival, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Berkeley Art Museum, Spectrum NYC, Roulette, Harvestworks, Tangible Music Lab in Linz, and the International Print Center. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Leonardo Music Journal, and Resonance, and her most recent album, Plastiglomerates, was released by the American Composers Forum on its Innova label.
As an educator engaged in advocacy for new music and sound art, she has taught at Princeton University and the School of Visual Arts in NYC and mentored students at the Cooper Union School of Art.
As a researcher in sound, she has been affiliated with the New York University Center for Neural Science, working on speech and music research. This work led to publications in The Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, PLoS Biology, and other peer-reviewed journals in auditory neuroscience, music psychology, and perception.
Her current work explores physical material for embodying light and sound as experience. This project challenges the increasing dominance of passive consumer media and the "inevitability" of increasingly nonhuman technology.