• champions - through presentation and commissioning - a community of artists interested in expanding their practice through interdisciplinary collaboration.
• provides artists with an early spotlight for their most ambitious work, celebrating ideas that challenge the traditions of performance.
• empowers artists to maintain control over how their work is experienced by advancing the purposeful development of all aspects of the public presentation of their art.
Avant Media was founded in 2003 by composer Randy Gibson and filmmaker Ana Baer with the goal of building a community of artists interested in cross-discipline collaboration and providing these artists with a platform to present their work in a focused environment. Since its founding, Avant Media has been dedicated to high production values and creating a total experience for our audience. From immersive multimedia experiences like 2007’s Anger to collaborative performances like Aqua Madora, to short multi-disciplinary films like Mujeres de Juárez or Shiver, we originate wide-ranging works built from the ground up by artists collaborating on a singular vision.
Artistic Director Randy Gibson’s interest in enveloping sound worlds with light, video, and scent built an ethos of totality of performance which helped inspire the Avant Music Festival, founded in 2010 by Gibson and Megan Schubert as a platform for contemporary American composers to experiment with long-form concerts and the full programmatic experience of their work, and an expanded Season of programming that allows for exploration of large-scale works and singular programmatic visions.
The annual Avant Music Festival offers featured composers the freedom to program a full night of their own music unfettered by concerns of duration, scope, or aesthetics. Our goal as producers is to realize the dreams of the composers we work with.
After five years of successful festivals we are launching a monthly series of concerts, Tangents, to offer this same sort of freedom to performers that we offer to composers, choreographers, creators of work.
