Alexia Webster
Facilitator · Improviser, Other · Johannesburg, South Africa
I am a South African photographer, filmmaker and visual artist who has explored family, migration, ecology and the unconscious world. I have worked extensively in the documentary field, across visual and storytelling mediums.
Derek Gripper
Mentor · String Player, Educator · Cape Town, South Africa
Derek Gripper is a guitarist from Cape Town, South Africa, known for his groundbreaking work translating the music of the West African kora onto six-string classical guitar. His practice bridges classical guitar, Malian repertoire, oral tradition, improvisation, and deep listening. Gripper has become widely recognized for his adaptations of music by Toumani Diabaté and other kora masters, expanding the vocabulary of the guitar while opening new conversations between African musical traditions and contemporary classical performance.
Elena
Facilitator · String Player, Other · Brooklyn, New York City, United States
I play music, swim in natural bodies of water, and think about urban policy.
Found Sound Nation
Facilitator · Organizer · Ridgewood, New York City, United States
Over the past 15 years, Found Sound Nation has worked with a diverse array of institutions and partners, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Doris Duke Foundation, TED, MIT, The New School, and many more, to create music-centered socially impactful programming. These initiatives - from songwriting workshops with incarcerated youth to music-making & listening seminars for MIT entrepreneurs - cemented our belief in the transformative potential of co-creation across geographic, cultural, and demographic boundaries. In 2012, we launched OneBeat, a groundbreaking music diplomacy program in partnership with the U.S. State Department. OneBeat brought together outstanding musicians from around the world to collaborate, create, and develop new models for civic and social engagement through music.
Jess Tsang
Facilitator · Percussionist, Experimental Musician · Bushwick, United States
Jess Tsang is a percussionist, researcher, and improviser dedicated to the creation of new interdisciplinary works. Through her creative practice, she is endlessly examining how objects shape our lives, and how that might be translated into music. After participating in OneBeat in 2019, Jess began working for Found Sound Nation in 2022 and currently serves as the Programs Manager for OneBeat and other musical exchange programs. She is a founding member of guitar and percussion duo party of one, and released sound shadows, her debut album for amplified bass drum, feedback, and objects, in 2021. Most recently, Jess premiered and performed in Justin Peck and Jackie Sibbles Drury's Tony-award winning musical, Illinoise.
Kasiva Matua
Facilitator · Drummer, Educator · Nairobi, Kenya
Kasiva Mutua is an internationally touring drummer and percussionist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her exuberant performances reflect a panoply of influences mainly inspired by cultures she has interacted with. One of few African women playing percussion continentally and internationally, Kasiva plays music to celebrate her community’s spirit, tell her people’s stories, and elevate the place of the African woman in music. She is the co-founder of MOTRAMUSIC, an all female percussion collective in Nairobi, Kenya, that teaches young women and girls the art of percussion and drumming. Citing the girl child and gender equality as issues she is passionate about, Kasiva continues to motivate women to diversify their positions in music and inspire the young generation to continue preserving their culture.
Kyla-Rose Smith
Facilitator · String Player · Cape Town, South Africa
i'm a blob amongst blobs....thinking my way to a new reality
Marianetti Christopher
Facilitator · Composer, Producer · Jackson Heights, United States
Christopher Marianetti is a composer, filmmaker, and producer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose work uses collaborative art-making and technology to connect people across cultural and societal divides. He co-founded Found Sound Nation, a production company and nonprofit, and currently leads the American Musician Mentorship Program, developed in partnership with the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs®, supporting musician entrepreneurs and music industry professionals around the world. He previously co-founded and served as artistic director of OneBeat, a music diplomacy initiative that brought together over 800 artists from 80+ countries and raised more than $15 million for music-based programming globally. Christopher is a 2025 Creative Capital Award Winner, MacDowell Fellow, and TED Global Featured Artist. His work has been presented at Carnegie Hall, MASS MoCA, WOMEX, and the Lucerne Festival. His short film Wall Piano screened at 25+ festivals and won 10 awards.
Ng Chor Guan
Facilitator · Composer, Synthesist · Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Ng Chor Guan is one of Malaysia’s most sought-after music composers and sound designers for theatre, dance, film and new media. A familiar face in many international arts festivals across the continents, Chor Guan is a prolific artist whose diverse body of work is rooted in the contemporaneous currents of technology and yet proves to transcend categories in the performing arts. Utilizing innovative musical approaches and emerging technologies, Ng Chor Guan aims to create work that in his words “represent [our] era,” yet remain “poignant and timeless.” His most recent project, “Finding” Series, is an audio-visual installation and performance powered by a bike generator and engaging with real and imagined environmental crisis and rhetoric.
NINA NINA
Facilitator · DJ, MC, Producer · Mexico City, Mexico
Daniela Ordóñez Guerrero, aka NINA NINA, is a multidisciplinary artist with musical training and origins in hip-hop and house music. Their music travels through the Latin rhythms of her native Veracruz coast and the world, incorporating the fabulousness of vogue and the odysseys of electronic leftfield. From live concerts to playful and daring DJ sets, they propose eclectic journeys for audiences who love to party. Club queen of the queer underground, with a national and international presence, the language of NINA NINA is translated into synthesizers, mixers and rhythm machines. NINA NINA recently toured in Colombia, Uruguay and Argentina, where they are recognized in the LGBTQIA+ circles and underground circuits. They are also part of LAS HIJAS DEL RAP, an all female/non binary hip hop collective that re-appropriates tools of urban culture to strengthen joyful, pleasurable, and audacious feminist narratives in Latin America.