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Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts
A performance with the main character speaking into a microphone behind a large podium surrounded by people in dark flowing costumes and elaborate headdresses in front of a blue backdrop.

Visiting Artists

World-renowned, interdisciplinary artists are invited to visit the University of Houston main campus to engage with students, faculty, staff and the general public. The Mitchell Center offers various opportunities to engage with these dynamic artists who cross disciplines, support artistic experimentation, foster collaboration and inspire experimental thinking and creativity. Artist visits vary in length and type and are determined by the artist’s project.

2032-24 Season

A black man, slightly smiling, wearing a beanie in front of a window

Robert Machiri

Robert ‘Chi’ Machiri born in 1978, in Zimbabwean, is an artist living between Harare, Johannesburg and Berlin. He works primarily through sound mediation. Machiri's work exists at the juncture of two streams of practice, intuitive curatorial ideas and post-disciplinary reproduction presented through embodied critique of knowledge. Learnign to unlearn by intersecting listening, movement, mobility, music and images. His most notable project PUNGWE is a mutable project that circles pan African soundings with related contemporary arts discourses and spaces.

Visit Robert's Instagram >

A photo of a woman with light blond hair, pale skin and blue eyes, smiling

Jennifer Teets

Jennifer Teets is a Houston born curator and writer based in Paris working at the intersection of science studies, literature, and performance. Her recent curatorial work includes "Carbonate of Copper", at Artpace, San Antonio in 2022 a transdisciplinary exhibition of international and Texas-based visual artists and scholars. She regularly guest lectures in institutions such as the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Université Paris 8, Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and Monash University, Melbourne. She is currently working towards two titles, one forthcoming from Spector Books, and the second Inventory Press. Aside from curating, she convenes and directs Matter in Flux (MiF), a mentorship circle tied to artistic inquiry, literature, and ecology. She is currently organizing "Intimate confession is a project" opening October 27, 2023 - March 10, 2024 at the Blaffer Art Museum, one in a series of exhibitions on the intersection of cultural inheritance and infrastructure.

 Read more about "Intimate confession is a project" >

A black and white close-up of a smiling, light-skinned woman with dark hair wearing a dark jacket and headphones hanging around her neck. A desert-like landscape behind her.

Tania Candiani

Tania Candiani was born in Mexico City in 1974 and currently lives and works there. She has worked in various media and practices, maintaining her interest in the complex intersection between phonetics, graphics, linguistics, the symbolic and the technological. She has employed different narratives of association, rearranging, remixing and playing with correspondences between technology, knowledge and thought. Thus, Candiani uses the idea of organization and reorganization as discourse and critical thinking and empirical research as material for production. The translation between diverse systems of representation is key in the materialization of her works. She creates interdisciplinary working groups in various fields, consolidating intersections between art, design, literature, music, architecture and science, with an emphasis on the recovery of early technologies and their history in the production of knowledge. Her projects are related to crafts, work, tradition, sound, synesthesia, rhythm and translation. 

Learn about Tania's upcoming exhibition at Blaffer Art Museum >

Four musicians pose somewhat seriously in what appears to be an industrial warehouse

HUB New Music

Called “contemporary chamber trailblazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music (Michael Avitabile Gleb Kanasevich, Meg Rohrer and Jesse Christeson) is a “nimble quartet of winds and strings” (NPR) forging new paths in 21st-century repertoire. Founded in 2013, Hub New Music has grown into a formidable international touring ensemble driven by an unwavering dedication to building community through new art. Over the last decade, Hub has commissioned dozens of new works and continues to usher in fresh and culturally relevant pieces for its distinct combination of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. Hub is proud to collaborate with today’s most celebrated emerging and established composers, and is equally proud to count many of them as friends. As educators, Hub is dedicated to empowering future generations of artists. The ensemble was recently in residence with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Nancy and Barry Sanders Composer Fellowship program, working  with 10 outstanding high school aged composers.

hubnewmusic.org >

A japanese woman, slim and lithe, poses lyrically in front of an urban cement wall with a bright red textile

Eiko Otake

Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma, but since 2014 has been working on her own projects. Eiko & Koma created numerous performance works, exhibitions, durational “living” installations, and media works commissioned by American Dance Festival, BAM Next Wave Festival, the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. Recipients of two Bessies (1984 and 1990), Eiko & Koma were the first collaborative pair to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996) and the first Asian choreographers to receive the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (2004) and the Dance Magazine Award (2006). A recipient of an honorary degree from Colorado College (2020), Eiko teaches at Wesleyan University, New York University, and Colorado College.

 eikootake.org >

A black man sits at a drumset with a focused look on his face as he plays the drums

Tyshawn Sorey

Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey (b. 1980) is celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery and memorization of highly complex scores, and an extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, as well as artists such as John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Myra Melford, among many others. His music has been performed in notable venues such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Village Vanguard, the Ojai Music Festival, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Kimmel Center, and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. Sorey has received support for his creative projects from The Jerome Foundation, The Shifting Foundation, Van Lier Fellowship, and was named a 2017 MacArthur fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow. Sorey has released twelve critically acclaimed recordings that feature his work as a composer, co-composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and conceptualist. Sorey joined the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020.

tyshawnsorey.com >
A man with darkbrown hair and brown eyes and a small amount of facial hair looks down at an angle contemplatively

Samora Pinderhughes

Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist/vocalist, interdisciplinary artist, and sur-realist whose work delves into all the things our society tries to hide - about its history, about its structures, and about the individual and daily things we all experience but don’t know how to talk about. His art is an invitation to feel things deeply, and to think deeply about how we all live. He is known for his honest lyrics, his harmonic language, his vulnerable visuals, his sociopolitical commentary, and his commitment to making art that is of use to everyday life.

Pinderhuges, alongside his creative collaborators, will present The Healing Project, an intimate community gathering and concert that invites people to experience what freedom sounds like, and feel their way into a more compassionate society.

The Houston production of The Healing Project is co-presented by the Mitchell Center, Project Row Houses and the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.

Reserve Your Free Tickets for The Healing Project >

samorapinderhughes.com >

A young woman with white skin and dark hair looks up at the camera from a lounging position is on a carpet

Amanda Ekery

Vocalist and composer Amanda Ekery collaborates with everyone, literally. Amanda works with all to create projects that invite others to explore and share their stories. She weaves her experience in improvisatory creative music, research, and jazz into her compositions, workshops, and performances. Her compositions have earned support from New Music USA, Chamber Music America, and the Jerome Foundation, and have been featured at the Portland Jazz Festival, Panama Jazz Festival, and the Kennedy Center. Amanda earned a 2022 ASACAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer's Award honorable mention for her composition “Three Days” which is part of Árabe, a collaboration with the Syrian Ladies Club, her family, and neighbors about Syrian immigration to El Paso/Mexico and the influence these mixed cultures had on film, food, economy and music. She is the founder of El Paso Jazz Girls, a non-profit organization for young female musicians that serves as a direct, practical intervention for gender equity in her hometown jazz community and which earned Amanda the 2022 Jazz Hero Award from the Jazz Journalist Association. Amanda holds a Master of Music in Jazz Performance from the New England Conservatory and a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies from the University of North Texas. She is on faculty at the New School and Fordham University and a regular at the Cortelyou Library in Brooklyn, NY.

While in residency at the University of Houston, Ekery will work with students to write songs and play selections from her upcoming album, Árabe, culminating in a free performance at Asia Society Texas' public art installation Rafael Domenech and Tomas Vu: Heat Silhouette, co-comissioned by the Mitchell Center. She'll be collaborating with the Community Arts Academy at the University of Houston as well as with members of the public to realize the Aprill 5th performance. All are welcome to join the creative process! Click on the link below for details and to sign up.

Apply to be a part of Árabe! >

 aekerymusic.com >

FEATURED WORKS

  • Tyshawn Sorey sits surrounded by percussion instruments such as cymbals performing music. Other musicians fill the stage around him.
    Tyshawn Sorey
  • compositional sheet music lays open on a table, a hand with nails painted blue, gestures a four above the music
    Amanda Ekery
  • A person stands in alignment with the sun on a bleak, flat landscape. The photo is black and white and has a grainy treatment reminiscinet of vintage film.
    Samora Pinderhughes
  • A dark room with a bench in front of three large screens showing people wearing all black, each screen showing a succession of close-up to macro images.

    Tania Candiani

  • The artist lays draped in an industrial setting of concete with a purple textile underneath her body. She is wearing an off white dress and her body looks limp.

    Eiko Otake

  • The members of HUB New Music perform their various instruments against a colorful, segmented background.

    HUB New Music

     


  • Rob Machiri DJs at an event

    Rob Machiri