Composer, teacher, organizer, and actor, Elizabeth Adams works at the intersection of art, education, and social change. Her compositions use sound to invoke social and political metaphors, and have been performed throughout Europe and all around New York City. With Julie Harting, she produces Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series as occasions to connect musical affect to our political concerns, and invite musicians and audiences to reimagine their relations of production. With the Free University NYC, she has helped organize 25 pop-up universities in public spaces on topics ranging from decolonizing climate justice, to resisting mass incarceration, to responding to sexualized violence in movement spaces. Free University’s events simultaneously manifest direct action, free political education, and movement-building. She is proud to organize with the Crown Heights Tenant Union for housing justice. With the Orfeo Duo, she ran Songlines, a collaborative public mapping of over seventy blocks through song writing and parade, and The Garden Performance Project, an instrument building and composition workshop held with neighbors in community gardens. As an actor, she co-starred with Brook Celeste in Susan Parenti’s play, Unrequited, which depicts capitalism and socialism as co-dependent lovers. Having earned her doctorate in composition from the CUNY Graduate Center, she has taught music theory at Columbia University, music history and composition at Baruch College, and given guest lecturers at The New School, Bard College, The Evergreen State College, and Universidad Iberoamericano. She joined the School for Designing a Society as a student in 2005, and as a teacher in 2010. With Jacob Barton she helped co-found Xenharmonic Praxis Summer Camp. She holds other degrees in English, Music, Composition, and Musiktheater from Barnard, Stony Brook, and the Hochschule der Kunste, Bern. You can hear her compositions at soundcloud.com/elizabethadamscomposes, and on the Indexical label. She is currently at work on a book with Danielle Chynoweth, provisionally entitled "Democratize This! How We Make the World We Want."
CV available on request.