Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, performance artist, musician and co-founder of The School of Making Thinking (SMT) an artist/thinker residency program and experimental college. Much of his work involves rekindling the connection between the philosophical and the performative by creating quasi-structured conversations through games, improvisational scores, booklets, audio guides, dance maps, theatrical lectures, existential therapy and philosophic rituals. Finbloom has taught philosophy at Suffolk County Community College, and has curated dozens interdisciplinary immersive courses for SMT. His work has been featured at the performance collective “Milk Bar” in Bristol (UK), Elsewhere in Greensboro (NC), BETA Spaces in Brooklyn (NY), Figment (NYC), International Association for the Study of Place, Space and Environment, Towson (MD), and Workspace for Choreographers, Sperryville (VA). Finbloom holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Art from SUNY Stony Brook and currently he is housed within Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program.
Sandeep Bhagwati is a multiple award-winning composer, theatre director and media artist [Studies: Mozarteum Salzburg, Musikhochschule München and IRCAM Paris]. His compositions and comprovisations (including 6 operas/music theatres) are regularly performed worldwide, by now also including festival retrospectives of his oeuvre. He has curated several festivals and long-term inter-traditional projects with Asian musicians. A Canada Research Chair for Inter-X Art at Concordia University since 2006, he also was Professor at Karlsruhe Music University, Composer-in-Residence/Fellow/Guest Professor at IRCAM Paris, ZKM Karlsruhe, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, IEM Graz, CalArts Los Angeles, Heidelberg University, University of Arts Berlin and Tchaikovsky Conservatory Moscow. At Concordia, he currently directs matralab, a research/creation center for performance arts. His current work centers on comprovisation, inter-traditional aesthetics, gestural & sonic theatre and interactive, multi-modal scores. From 2008 to 2011, he also was the director of Hexagram Concordia Research Centre.