Join us on April 30 @ 6:30pm for a conversation on music, art, politics and more with Maggie Rogers (NYU Tisch ’16). Moderated by Allyson Green and Nicholas Sansano.
In the two years since graduation, Maggie Rogers has been busy, as she details in her new short documentary Back In My Body. She has been writing and recording music, collaborating with luminaries, and touring the world – all while holding fast to her own artistic vision, and the unique voice and viewpoint – and on April 30, she’s coming back to NYU Skirball to tell us all about it.
This event is part of the new series SKIRBALL TALKS. Held weekly every Monday at 6:30pm during the academic terms, SKIRBALL TALKS hosts visionaries from the worlds of politics, the arts, sciences, academia, and more.
*PLEASE READ IN FULL RE SEAT RESERVATIONS: RSVP does not guarantee a ticket. You can begin picking up tickets at the NYU Box Office (566 LaGuardia Pl) 2 hours prior to event. Even if you have picked up a ticket, please be aware that if you are not seated in the theater by 6:20pm, we will be opening up the theater to people in standby line. Tickets must be claimed by 6:10 pm. Unclaimed tickets will be released to those on the standby line.
Maggie Rogers‘ breakout single “Alaska” is featured on her debut EP Now That The Light Is Fading, out on Capitol Records. The EP includes four original songs written, produced and performed by the 23-year-old multi-instrumentalist. It was an unfinished version of “Alaska” that introduced Rogers to an unexpectedly wide audience in the summer of 2016. The young artist, who grew up playing banjo in Maryland, was working on her music at The Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and played an early version of the song during a Masterclass taught by Pharrell Williams. After it was posted on YouTube, acclaim began pouring in from a dizzying number of media outlets. “Alaska” has since charted in Spotify’s Viral 50 in 40 countries, hit #1 in 23 countries and now has over 80 million global streams to date. In 2017 Rogers was chosen as a Tidal Artist To Watch (RISING) and as a Google Play Music Artist To Watch. Vevo, Pandora, the BBC and numerous publications – including Rolling Stone, Billboard and more – have also tipped her as an artist to watch. NPR named her one of its Favorite Musicians of 2016 and The New Yorker declares, “Maggie Rogers is an artist of her time.” Rogers has sold out headline tours of both North America and Europe as performed as festivals including, Firefly, Glastonbury, Lollapalooza Outside Lands and more. Her latest track “Split Stones” is out now and Maggie is currently working on her debut album out later this year on Capitol Records.
Maggie Rogers, in her own words:
Dear listening ears/reading eyes,
For a long time I’ve introduced myself as a banjo player from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I’m a hiker and an environmentalist. I’m an optimist. I’m loud.
I’m still those things, but I went quiet for a few years. I cut my long hair short. I got a cat named Cat Stevens. I fell in love. I moved to New York, to France, and back.
Inevitably, I found my space in the place between knowing who I was and finding out who I am.
I’m a producer, songwriter, and performer from Brooklyn. I’m an optimist. I’m a feminist. I’m loud when I laugh. I’m freckled. I love my old jeans. I love pink eye-shadow. I cry when I dance sometimes. I feel a lot, maybe too much, but in a song it always seems to be just enough.
The thing about songs is that no matter how far away I go, or how long I stay away, they always seem to find me. And as wild and unpredictable as they are, I’ve learned to trust them. I write to feel and sing ‘til I feel a new way.
I love the music most when it makes me feel human. Feet on the ground, soft hair, standing with my friends and in three parts, singing. Feet off the ground, hair wild, moving to that perfect pulse that mimics your beat and mine.
Sometimes I think it’s magic – this thing we can’t see, but makes us all feel the same way. When it’s real, it raises hair and makes the air taste sweeter.
I want to make music forever. I want to tell the truth. I want to know how it feels to make the best art I’m capable of making.
I can’t promise I won’t change or that I won’t fall in love with new people or ideas that’ll change the way I see the world, but I can promise to be me. To be present. To be open. To be messy. To be flawed.
To be human. And of that, I won’t let you down.
x Maggie
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Dean Allyson Green is a choreographer, visual artist, curator and arts educator. Integrating artistic creative development and education, advocacy for the arts, and service to the local and international community has been the mission of her multi-faceted career. Her creative research has been particularly influenced by two decades of residencies in East and Central Europe, South America, and Mexico; community projects for arts engagement; and ongoing site-specific collaborations with visual artist Peter Terezakis that explore the intersection of art and technology and environmental issues.
Dean Green is a full professor in the Tisch School of the Arts Department of Art and Public Policy, with an affiliation in the Department of Dance, and will continue to teach in both areas. From 2012 to 2014, she was the Associate Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts Institute of Performing Arts (IPA) and oversaw all of the performing arts departments, as well as Art and Public Policy and Tisch Open Arts. She began shaping the vision for the IPA with new programming ideas for cross-department collaborations and artists-in-residence, and continued Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell’s decade-long plans for a new performing arts center. She served as the Tisch Global Dean for Curriculum, and led the integration of Tisch study abroad programs into NYU’s global network. Dean Green, in collaboration with the departments, developed new curriculum initiatives that allow Tisch students to study within NYU’s global locations. She also served on the university-wide Space Priorities Working Group and the Distinguished Teaching Award committee.
Previously, Dean Green served as the Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego, in partnership with the La Jolla Playhouse. She earned the rank of Full Professor in Dance at UCSD in 2003. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Dance at San Diego State University from 2001 to 2003. She has developed BA, BFA., MA, MFA. and PhD. curriculum that included the launch of a new graduate program in dance theater, as well as new courses for the study of aesthetics and criticism, arts citizenship, arts management and entrepreneurship, art and technology, collective creation, and somatic arts workshops with medical leaders, neuroscientists, and community organizers.
Additionally, she served as the Artistic Director of Sushi Performance and Visual Art, a contemporary interdisciplinary arts center in San Diego from 2003 to 2005. She was named one of the outstanding arts leaders in San Diego for her work in the direction of national and international festivals, with programming in dance, visual art, music, performance art, spoken word and theater; and for developing cross-cultural arts events in the San Diego/Tijuana border region. Recent projects included the creation of the Cal-Laboratory Kitchen for international artists, the Arts in Action Festival, and the Wonderland International Dance Festival with Martin Wolleson, UCSD ArtPower!.
Based in NYC from 1986 to 2001, Dean Green established a distinguished career as a performer, choreographer, and graphic designer. She was a noted performer in the companies of Yoshiko Chuma SOHK, Charles Moulton, Doug Varone, Randy Warshaw, and Bill Young, as well as with numerous independent choreographers. A frequent international collaborator, she created projects with choreographers José Navas and Dominique Porte (Montreal, Canada); Meg Stuart (Brussels, Belgium); Ben Wright (London, Great Britain); Iskra Sukarova (Skopje, Macedonia); Cosmin Manolescu (Burcharest, Romania); Olga Zitluhina (Riga, Latvia); and Lux Boreal Contemporanea Danza (Tijuana, Mexico).
As a choreographer, she has created over 100 dance theatre works that have been presented in 18 countries and throughout the United States since 1993. Her bibliography reflects an extensive body of commissioned national and international works in major venues, universities, companies, and festivals, which have achieved consistent critical acclaim and funding from the top foundations. Her company, Allyson Green Dance, has been supported by the Joyce Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, The Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, the U.S. Department of State, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, CEC ArtsLink, and 10 fellowships from The Suitcase Fund, with major funding from The Trust for Mutual Understanding and the Rockefeller Foundation.
In addition to her work in the performing arts, Dean Green maintained a visual arts career as a painter and an award-winning graphic designer for numerous arts organizations and PBS television. She was the creative director of Allyson Green Design from 1983 to 2001, which received awards including Emmys for her design work in print, television, and dance film.
Dean Green also has extensive training in music, and creates original sound scores, set, costume and projection designs for her dance theater works. In her creative projects, she regularly collaborates with composers, most notably Alan Stones, Paul Dresher, Guy Yarden, and Mio Morales.
Dean Green received a B.F.A. cum laude in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She was awarded the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship for graduate studies by the National Department of Education and received her M.F.A. in Choreography from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where she was named the Fine Arts Graduate student of the decade.
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Nicholas Sansano was born in Bronx, NY and earned his Bachelor of Music degree in 1986 from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, where he studied piano performance, arranging, and music production & engineering. He joined the faculty of The Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in 2004, and is now the Institute’s Associate Chair, its Director of Production Curriculum, and its Director of Musicianship and Performance Curriculum. Tisch School of The Arts awarded him The David Payne Carter Award for Teaching Excellence in 2013-2014.
Nick began his professional career in earnest at Greene Street Recording in NYC, recording and mixing for a variety of seminal Hip Hop and Alternative Music artists – including Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Rob Base, and Run DMC. His work in early Hip Hop attracted the attention of Sonic Youth, with whom he would co-produce and record the albums “Daydream Nation” and “Goo,” two critically acclaimed and historic alternative music releases. Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation” and Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions” and “Fear of Black Planet” were selected for inclusion in the US Library of Congress Archive of Culturally Significant American Recordings.
Nick’s genre-crossing work has taken him around the world, producing recordings in Australia, New Zealand, and all throughout Europe. In France, he found success producing multi-platinum recordings for the groups IAM, Zebda and Noir Desir – blending French pop genres with musicians from North Africa, Spain, and the Middle East. His francophone work has earned him three Victoire De La Music Awards from the French Recording Academy.
In all, Nick has been awarded over 17 Gold, Platinum, and Diamond Record awards worldwide. Despite the commercial success, it is his work outside the mainstream with artists such as Galactic, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Le Tigre, and Mbongeni Ngema that defines who he is as a musician and producer.
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The Skirball Talks series is co-sponsored by NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, and is made possible in part by a Humanities New York Action Grant and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
