Daniel Temkin
After a youth filled with drum set, orchestral percussion, and songwriting, composer Daniel Temkin has become known for crafting works filled with rich detail and visceral beauty.

Daniel has been Composer-in-Residence with Music from Angel Fire (New Mexico), Chamber Music Northwest (Portland), Chamber Music by the Bay (San Francisco), and the Intimacy of Creativity Festival (Hong Kong). He has received grants and fellowships from New Music USA, the American Composers Forum, Amphion Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, Earshot, the Theodore Presser Foundation, and others, as well as numerous awards, including the Indianapolis Symphony's Marilyn K. Glick Prize, two BMI Composer Awards, and Honorable Mention as MTNA's Distinguished Composer of the Year.

Daniel's orchestra music has been widely performed. In 2016, MacArthur Fellow Bright Sheng conducted Rising Moon with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and Cataclysm was performed by Santtu-Matias Rouvali and the Indianapolis Symphony, after previous performances with the USC Symphony and the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic in Russia. Daniel's piece Chasm was performed by the Curtis Symphony and subsequently selected by Robert Spano for a performance at the inaugural Aspen Composers Showcase. Meanwhile, his earlier works Regenerations and Rolling River were read by the Nashville Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Rutgers, NEC, and Brevard Orchestras.

Daniel has also collaborated with leading chamber groups, including PRISM Quartet, Mirror Visions Ensemble, members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center & CMS II, and many musicians from Ensemble Connect, Astral Artists, and Young Concert Artists. Daniel has also worked with emerging new music groups around the U.S. including Kinetic Ensemble (Houston), Zafa Collective (Chicago), Agarita (San Antonio), and the Exponential Ensemble (NYC). His music has been featured American Public Media's "Performance Today" with Fred Child, PBS Philadelphia's "WHYY" series, and many other outlets. Daniel can also be heard as a composer, percussionist, and conductor on recordings of the Naxos, Albany, and Navona labels.

Directing the presenting series DTM Concerts, Daniel has worked for over a decade to curate and champion contemporary music with many groups. In 2020, Duo ING performs the "Refractions" project at the Yellow Barn Festival and the Tenri Cultural Center in New York, and in 2019, the acclaimed Aizuri Quartet gave a five-city tour of the "Intricate Machines" program, with both projects extensively featuring recent works by living composers. Previously, Daniel served as Assistant Director and Percussionist with Thornton EDGE sinfonietta (2014-16), Acting Artistic Director of the Melos Music collective (2010-12), and Assistant Director of the Aspen Percussion Ensemble (2007), organizing many premieres, recordings, and tours with these groups.

Daniel earned degrees in Percussion and Composition from Rutgers (BM), NEC (MM), Curtis (AD), and USC (DMA). He received composition fellowships from the Aspen, Fontainebleau, and Brevard festivals, and also spent two additional summers at Aspen as a percussionist. He has previously taught as a Lecturer or Graduate Assistant at each of his major educational institutions, and at the Walden Festival in New Hampshire. In 2019, Daniel joined Bucknell University in Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor of Music.

Ashley Jackson
Praised for her “soulful” and “eloquent” playing (Musical America), harpist Ashley Jackson enjoys a multifaceted career as a highly sought-after musician and collaborator in New York and beyond.

As a soloist, she has performed at Lincoln Center, Celebrate Brooklyn! and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She has also performed with the New York Philharmonic, Metropolis Ensemble, the Qatar Philharmonic, and is the principal harpist of NOVUS NY, the contemporary music orchestra of Trinity Wall Street led by Grammy-nominated conductor Julian Wachner. She is a member of the Harlem Chamber Players, with whom she has developed a number of projects, including her first film, In Song and Spirit and the Harlem Walking Tour Series.

Throughout her academic and professional careers, Ashley has demonstrated a commitment to diversity and inclusion within higher education and the performing arts, firmly believing that a deeper understanding of cultural and ethnic diversity is critical to intellectual and artistic development. As a recipient of the Theodore Presser Award, she pursued her doctoral research on black female composer Margaret Bonds and her collaboration with Langston Hughes, and presented her findings in lectures at the Studio Museum of Harlem, WMP Concert Hall, and the University of North Carolina. Her research culminated in the release of the album, The Ballad of the Brown King and Selected Songs (Avie Records) on which she is a featured performer, as well as the author of the liner notes. Her speaking engagements have included “1960: Margaret Bonds and a Message for Civil Rights” (Juilliard), “Affinities: Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes,” (Studio Museum of Harlem) and “Representation as Resistance: How an Activist Orchestra Redresses the Push-out of Black Practitioners from Classical Music” (Harvard University). As a writer, her works have appeared on NewMusicBox (“The Cultural Citizen: How Classical Music Got Me Woke") as well as in the International Journal of Women in Music (“Margaret Bonds and The Ballad of the Brown King: A Historical Overview”). She is currently an Assistant Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Music Department at Hunter College, where she teaches chamber music, harp, and courses such as the Arts in New York City.

Ashley holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Juilliard School, a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University.