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artistic director, composer, vocalist, performer, littleglobe co-founder, mom

MOLLY STURGES is an internationally established composer and artistic director. She is best known for her work integrating intermedia performance, community dialogue, and social and environmental justice and healing. Projects include working as guest artistic director with The Creative Center: Arts for People with Cancer, in NYC for a five-month project with women living with cancer; creator and director of Moment, a four-month intergenerational project with homeless older adults and students for The European Union Festival of Culture in Cork, Ireland, 2005; and Memorylines: Voces de Nuestras Jornadas, commissioned by The Santa Fe Opera and The Lensic Performing Arts Center which brought people together, ages 8 to 87, across economic and cultural lines in Santa Fe to create an original new opera dealing with identity and immigration.

Aside from being the co-founder and artistic director for Littleglobe, Sturges has been an artist in residence with a wide range of communities doing short-term creative arts projects involving arts and health including a residency at ARC cancer support center for The European Union Festival of Culture 2005 and nursing homes in the US and Ireland. As an artist in residence for The Santa Fe Opera, she directed Cuentos del Valle in 2006, a bilingual youth performance.

Current projects inlcude Lifesongs, a partnership with The Santa Fe Opera, writing music with elders in hospice and nursing homes to be performed by the UNM chorus; artisic director for Common Ground: TOC, a community capacity and arts project with intergenerational participants from two Eastern Agency Navajo communities and from the rural village of Cuba, NM; and composer and director for Salve, a intergenerational music project exploring the effects of war on individuals and families based upon interviews with returning veterans. During the summer of 2009 Sturges will be directing her first project in a series about coal with a small coal mining community in the UK (commissioned by Dance City).

Sturges is also a performing vocalist, recording artist, and leader of creative music ensembles. A recipient of numerous commissions and residencies, she has written and performed original music for a wide array of projects including music for dance companies, silent films, circuses and sound installations. Her ensemble, mJane, has received public acclaim for the release of their first album Prayers from the Underbelly on Pax Recordings.

Sturges holds an MA in composition from Wesleyan University. She has lived and worked in Kenya, Senegal and the Lakota community of Rosebud, South Dakota. She was previously the Director of Education at The Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, a project collaborator at The Art and Science Lab, and has worked extensively as an educator, lecturer and facilitator both abroad and in the United States.

In 2008 Sturges, together with long-time collaborator Chris Jonas, was awarded the prestigious United States Artist Fellowship in Music (unitedstatesartists.org).

*photo by michelle vest

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