Composers in Residence

Kiran Bhumber ਕਿਰਨਦੀਪ ਕੌਰ ਭੰਬਰ (she/her) is an Indo-Canadian interdisciplinary media artist, composer, performer, and educator. Her work results in constructing interactive installations and performances that examine movement, touch, and performativity. As a composer, Bhumber’s practice centers around multichannel and spatial arrangements and how the choreography of sound can influence the listeners notion of space, time and narrative. Bhumber co-created Telepresence, a VR performance presented by Western Front, and was a composer and sound designer for Tidal Traces, a VR 360 dance film with the National Film Board of Canada. Her work has been presented at MUTEK Japan, SXSW, and Cannes Film Festival, among others. Bhumber is a co-director of INTER/MEDIATE, a media art educational festival focused on cultivating growth within Vancouver’s media art communities and empowering marginalized communities. Bhumber is also a Sundance New Frontier alumni. 

Robyn Jacob is a composer, pianist, vocalist and educator living and working from the unceded territories of the Sḵwxwú7mesh, Xwməθkwəyəm and Səl’il’wətaʔ Nations. She has completed commissions for ensembles such as Grammy winning Third Coast Percussion (Chicago), Architek Percussion (Montreal), Grammy winning Sō Percussion (Brooklyn), Chor Leoni (Vancouver), and the Victoria Symphony, and has collaborated with visual artists, instrument makers, dance and theatre. Her debut record of concert music New Forevers was released in 2026 on Redshift Records. Her avant-pop project Only A Visitor (Mint Records) has toured internationally and released four albums to date. Jacob has released two albums with her duo project The Giving Shapes in collaboration with harpist Elisa Thorn. Her new solo project Immix explores the vocoder as its own instrument, digging into the emotive narratives of voice and electronics to find an emergent vocabulary hidden within the glitch and grain of synthesized voice. From 2012 to 2024 she was part of the multi-disciplinary art collective Publik Secrets, whose work included a variety of public space interventions, performances, installations and ephemeral gatherings, including Gamelan Bike Bike, which she co-led with artist and composer George Rahi for over ten years. Jacob is currently one of the members of the Five Blessings Collective, whose work celebrates the complexities found within stories and traditions from the Chinese diaspora through songs, audio plays, film and staged works.

Andromeda Monk is an improviser, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. Over the past two decades her music career has taken many turns, from jazz saxophone to avant-pop songs to no-input mixing board noise to synth soundscapes. She has played in over a dozen bands including folk group Olenka & the Autumn Lovers, twee-pop outfit Thee AHs, and avant-big band Space Elevator. Her last big project was producing the pop album It’s About Time! by Future Star, released on Mint Records in 2024. In recent years Monk has appeared at Suoni Per il Popolo in Montreal, Active/Passive on Galiano Island, and the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. She is currently living with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and learning to pace her music practice while disabled, integrating her acoustic and electronic selves, and falling in love with the guitar. When Monk is not music-ing she is probably reading fiction. She lives on the unceded lands of the Sḵwxwú7mesh, Xwməθkwəyəm and Səl’il’wətaʔ peoples.

Justin Devries is a musician and historian whose work lies at the intersections of percussion, electronics, and experimental composition techniques. His recent historical work investigated local settler interactions with experimental electronic musics and Indonesian musics in Vancouver from the 1960s to the early 1990s through the life and work of Martin Bartlett, completing an MA thesis in 2024 which provides one of the most comprehensive overviews of Bartlett’s life to date. His subsequent writing on Bartlett was also published in The Urban History Review/Revue d'histoire urbaine. His composition work includes the debut album of his group Universal Affirmation Ensemble, titled Unconditional Propositions and released on the USA-based Katutu Collective, as well as the piece Abu Masuk Tanah (Heart’s Contents)on the USA and Indonesia-based recording collective Insitu Recordings. Devries is a well-travelled percussionist, having performed locally and internationally as a percussionist with the bands Loving, Ora Cogan, Yawn, Jo Passed, Elisa Thorn, and many others, including on festival stages such as Pitchfork Festival Paris, Le Guess Who International Music Festival in Utrecht, London’s Mirrors Festival, and the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. He lives on the unceded territory of the Sḵwxwú7mesh, Xwməθkwəyəm and Səl’il’wətaʔ peoples.