Maddalena Ohrbach from À Mer (voice), Elissa Nakhleh from À Mer (piano), and Aditya Bhat (percussion), BMiR 2025 Open Studio, photo by Rita Taylor.
Step into the creative world of Banff Musicians in Residence. This relaxed evening invites you to wander through the studios and huts of our resident musicians, where each space becomes its own intimate stage.
Experience a series of spontaneous mini-concerts — short sets curated by the artists themselves on the day of the event — and enjoy the chance to listen, linger, and connect with music in its purest, most immediate form.
These Open Studios are part of the Banff Musicians in Residence program, which gives musicians and ensembles the time and space to develop new work, refine their craft, and collaborate in Banff Centre’s inspiring mountain setting.
January 22 Program
Please meet in the Rolston Recital Hall lobby at the start of the evening.
Performance times are approximate and may shift slightly depending on the length of each set.
7:00 PM – Miko Rytowski | Studio 109
7:25 PM – Johnny Tomasiello | Studio 103
7:50 PM – Justin Wright | Bentley Studio
8:15 PM – Alice Belém | Studio 145
8:40 PM – Rainbow Chan | Studio 141
9:05 PM – Gage Salnikowski | Hut 25
9:30 PM – Hannah Epperson | Hut 27
Open Studio Participants
Mikolaj Rytowski
Mikołaj Rytowski is a versatile instrumentalist and sound artist rooted in percussion, diverging from conventional norms to explore sound and creativity organically. His pracice spans improvisation, composition, and collaboration, moving beyond interpretation to actively engage with the creative process. As both creator and improviser, he pushes the boundaries of percussion and electronic instruments, constantly experimenting with new combinations and sonic innovations. His work challenges traditional perceptions of percussion, reflecting a commitment to exploration and artistic expression. Since 2019, Mikołaj has been living and working primarily in Basel, Switzerland.
Mikolaj Rytowski was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.
Johnny Tomasiello
Johnny Tomasiello is a multidisciplinary artist and composer-researcher, with a deep interest in expanded conceptualizations of sound, visuals, and time. His work employs methodologies across media, and is informed by research into neuroscience, psychophysics and biofeedback.
Focused on the relationship between perception and the mechanics of physiology, his immersive works, compositions, and performances reveal otherwise invisible processes in physiological and technological systems. Drawing on custom-built instruments and software, his work references mechanisms of expression and experience through data sonification, biofeedback, and reciprocal physiological systems.
He holds an MS in Digital Imaging and Design from NYU and a BS in Psychophysics from Rutgers/UMDNJ, as well as the completion of the thesis program in Electronic Music composition and Production, and a fine arts foundation with emphasis in painting, from Maryland Institute, College of Art (MICA).
As a performer, Tomasiello has produced live immersive performances and lectures featuring his interactive computer-assisted compositional performance systems and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) that create, manipulate, and deconstruct audio and visuals, as well as physiological responses. He has lectured on the subject, staged live performances, scored films, and shown works in galleries and at institutions in the US and abroad.
Johnny Tomasiello was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.
Justin Wright
Justin Wright is a composer, cellist, and multidisciplinary artist from Montreal. Wright’s music is characterized by a seamless blending of avant-garde approaches and timbral experimentation with the evocative and meditative spirit of folk and sacred music traditions. Classical concert halls, underground loft venues, art museums, pop music venues, planetariums, and the glaciers of the High Arctic have all comfortably been home to his performances, a reflection of his defiance of traditional categorization and wide-ranging artistic interests. Wright’s primary composition tools, for both electronic and acoustic music, are his cello, Ableton Live, a modular synthesizer, and a 4-track tape machine. His recent work aims to reengage with his scientific past as well as expand into other media such as film, photography, and DIY technology. Wright holds a BSc and MSc in molecular biology, and is currently a PhD candidate in music composition at Princeton University primarily studying under Tyondai Braxton and Donnach.
Justin Wright was generously supported by the Lewitt Family Foundation Artist Award.
Alice Belém
Highly interested in the solo and chamber repertoires of the XX and XXI centuries, the Brazilian pianist Alice Belém has already performed in Brazil, Portugal and Germany. She has recorded works of emerging and emblematic Brazilian contemporary composers for the projects ‘Brazilian Music’s Memory’, ‘Listen Here Festival’ and ‘I would like to hear...’. She has also premiered works and developed collaborations with composers from Latin America, United States and Japan.
Since 2022, Alice Belém has been developing interdisciplinary concerts joining music, video, dance and literature, aiming to rethinking the traditional concert experience. By collaborating with other performers, composers, video makers and dancers, Alice Belém aims to incorporate new creative methods and refresh her own performance skills through an interdisciplinary approach. Other key themes in her current work include the experimentation of extended piano techniques and reimagining works by other composers through contemporary lens.
Alice Belém concluded her PhD at the Music Department of the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil, and attended a Split-site doctoral program at the Cologne University of Music in Germany. She is currently a Professor at the School of Music of the State University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, where she teaches Piano, Chamber Music and Contemporary Music Performance.
Alice Belém was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.
Rainbow Chan
Rainbow Chan is an award-winning vocalist, producer and multi-disciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her practice bridges popular music and contemporary visual arts, exploring themes of cultural representation, (mis)translation, matrilineal histories and diasporic heritage. Central to her work is the research and reimagining of women’s oral traditions, particularly the fading bridal laments of Weitou women, Hong Kong’s first settlers, to whom she has deep ancestral ties. Through pop music, performance and immersive installations, she translates these endangered songs into contemporary art forms, preserving their subversive feminist voices while reflecting on loss, resilience and solidarity. She is particularly interested in the power of ritual, song and performance as both a means of reclaiming agency and a living archive.
Rainbow Chan was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.
Gage Salinowski
Gage Salnikowski is a multi-instrumentalist composer, sound artist, and performer, based in Winnipeg Manitoba Canada on Treaty One Territory.
As an autodidactic proficient in over 50 different instruments, Salnikowski’s work seeks to undermine the dichotomy between the colloquial and cultural academia. Embracing the avant-garde towards sublimation of the visceral and brutalist. Through merzbau of sound art installation, input reactive live coding, circumventive scoring and performance techniques, Salnikowski plunders and corrupts the technicality he has honed through years as a music educator for decidedly anti-academic results. A diptych of the absurd and accessible, Salnikowski’s work is equally at home performed in local bars as it is art galleries.
Gaining notoriety on various new outlets by performing and recording every instrument of symphonic works entirely solo as a ‘one-man orchestra’, Salnikowski’s primary output has been focused on live sound art installation and performance. As half the duocollective Savant Flâneur, Salnikowski uses audio programming languages, acoustic sound sculpture, and experimental compositional means to produce and perform works for various new music and arts festivals, and touring composers. Notably, Salnikowski’s work under the project has been visited by over 40,000 people through repeat sound art installations in various Nuit Blanche festivals.
Gage Salinowski was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.
Hannah Epperson
Crossing boundaries is a feature of Hannah Epperson’s life and music—from residence in the US and Canada to more than 300 live performances in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Singled out by Bandcamp as “one of the most stunningly unconventional artists making music today,” renowned musicologist/critic Ted Gioia chose her debut album Upsweep as one of the Top 3 recordings of 2016, calling it “unique, haunting, addictive.” Classically trained, her genre-bending violin looping and singing was enriched by apprenticeships with the fiddler of acclaimed Deseret String Band and studio work and performances with Fleet Foxes, Dirty Projectors, Julianna Barwick and Ry X. A graduate in Human Geography, a member of Canada’s world champion Ultimate Frisbee Team, Hannah embodies music as a bridge, gathering soundscapes and people together in transfiguring moments of live and studio performances.
Hannah Epperson was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.