Selected works
Each project begins with listening — to a place, a community, a moment in time. What comes out the other side is a live performance or installation built from real human voices, inside a classical container strong enough to hold them.
Newnan, Georgia · 2021–2026
A tornado recovery oral history. 100+ community voices woven into a multimedia live performance with the LaGrange Symphony Orchestra and Southern Arc Dance — built over five years of genuine relationship with a community that had to remain strong for each other. 17.2M media reach. Mayoral proclamation from the City of Newnan.
Oakland, California · 2019
Schubert's Winterreise — the pinnacle of the German art song repertoire — woven with the recorded voices of mothers living through housing instability in the Bay Area. The 19th-century song cycle and the women's testimony mapped onto each other with exact emotional precision. Coverage from KQED.
Touring concert · UC Davis · East Carolina University
A touring concert experience for one vocalist, built around custom-commissioned new music from the UK, Germany, the US, and Norway — exploring identity, illusion, and the soul. Created and performed by Emily Thorner. Gwendolyn served as creative director, shaping the concert architecture around Thorner's dual practice as soprano and spiritual healer.
Atlanta · In development
The next large-scale project is in its early relationship-building phase — which is to say, it is already underway. The work that matters most begins long before it has a name. More when the time is right.
The classical tradition is one of the most powerful containers human culture has ever made. What goes inside it — whose voices, whose stories, whose experience of being alive — is the only question that has ever mattered to me as an artist.
Each of these projects asked that question in a different place, with different people, through a different form. The methodology underneath them is the same: relationship before production, deep listening as composition, and the conviction that the people at the center of society's hardest experiences already know the way through. The artist's job is to build a room where that knowledge can be heard.