Moderator: August Brown, Reporter, LA Times August Brown is a music journalist at the Los Angeles Times. Over more than decade at the paper, he has covered every kind of tragedy, joy and excess in pop music, from the rise of festival culture’s multibillion-dollar decadence to the fires at the Ghost Ship warehouse venue, the gay Floridian death-metal underground, how to throw a festival in communist Cuba and the new prescription drug epidemic in hip-hop.
Elizabeth “Liz” Garo, VP of Talent, Spaceland Presents Since 2001, “Liz” Garo has worked at Spaceland Presents and has booked The Echo & Echoplex since inception. She continues to book and promote a variety of outside venues for Spaceland Presents, The Natural History Museum’s First Fridays, and Santa Monica’s Twilight Concert Series. In addition, Liz spearheaded the upstart indie festival Echo Park Rising, now in its ninth year. She has gone into unique spaces for shows including the Vista movie theater, Pico Union Sanctuary, Highland Park Legion Hall, Eagle Rock Bowling Alley, and the Los Angeles Public Library.
Matthew Himes, Director of Programming and Production – Levitt Pavilion Los Angeles With over 15 years of experience in the Southern California music and arts scene, along with booking international and local talent across jazz, rock, Latin music and more, Matthew curates the stellar lineup of 50 free concerts as Levitt LA’s Director of Programming & Production. Before joining Levitt, he was also festival director at Eagle Rock Music Festival, production manager at Spaceland Presents, and has helped produced events & festivals like Desert Daze, Cloak & Dagger, Echo Park Rising and KCRW’s Masquerade Ball. He has also served as live audio engineer for artists like Vince Staples, The Lemonheads, Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions to name a few. In addition, Matthew was a co-founder of L.A. Fort, a cooperative artistic DIY space that encourages collaboration between diverse artists. He loves listening to gospel, shoegaze, Afrobeat, global bass, and noise music, among other genres.
Howard Ho, Writer, Composer, and Sound Designer Howard Ho is a writer, composer, and Ovation nominated sound designer based in LA. As a sound designer, he has worked or is working with Center Theatre Group, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, East West Players, Playwrights’ Arena, Native Voices, Lodestone Theatre, the 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors, PULL Project, and Company of Angels. He is Ovation-nominated for sound design for BLOODLETTING, which will be revived in March at the Kirk Douglas Theatre under Center Theatre Group’s Block Party. As a writer, he is a 2017 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference Finalist for his play VARIOUS EMPORIA. He was a 2016 Center Theatre Group Literary Fellow and a 2013 NY State Summer Writers Institute Scholarship. He is a member of Playground-LA’s Writers Pool, where his play THE NIGHTINGALE MIXTAPE was presented in March 2016. He was a member of the Vagrancy Playwrights’ Group where he developed VARIOUS EMPORIAand DISAPPOINTMENT ISLAND.
Nick Schwartz-Hall, Sr. Producer, Programming, The Music Center A member of the Music Center’s Leadership Team and Programming Department; responsible for producing all Music Center programs, including festivals, Sleepless, Dance DTLA, The Music Center On Location, Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center, and other programs.
Derrick Spiva Jr., composer, conductor, musician Derrick Spiva Jr. is a composer and musician based in the Los Angeles area who often integrates music practices from different cultural traditions around the world into his work with classical music communities. The Los Angeles Times has described his music as “something to savor” and “enormous fun to listen to.” During his studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and the California Institute of the Arts, music across many cultures became an integral part of his musical vocabulary. Spiva studied classical music with Ian Krouse, Alex Shapiro, Paul Chihara, and David Rosenboom while also studying West African music and dance with Kobla Ladzekpo; Persian music theory with Pirayeh Pourafar and Houman Pourmehdi; Balkan music theory with Tzvetanka Varimezova; and tala (rhythmic cycles) in Hindustani classical music with Swapan Chaudhuri and Aashish Khan.
Jonathan Beard, Composer, Lecturer UCLA Alpert Jonathan Beard creates music for media and the concert stage. As a composer, his recent projects include De tu puño y letra, a video-sound installation on display at the SF MOMA through 2019; the film score What Still Remains; and his electroacoustic opera Cesare, Child of Night. He has served on the composing teams for video games such as Star Wars Battlefront I and II, and guest-composed for ABC’s Once Upon A Time. For the stage, Jonathan co-composed the oratorio The Passion Of Anne Frank for the Los Angeles Master Chorale as part of their Voices Within residency, and his original theatre-score for Driving Miss Daisy received an NAACP Theatre Award nomination. One of the most sought-after orchestrators in Los Angeles, Jonathan values collaboration with other composers very deeply. He has worked closely with composers Junkie XL (Alita: Battle Angel; Deadpool) and Bear McCreary (Godzilla: King of the Monsters; 10 Cloverfield Lane) for many years on numerous film, television, and video game projects, and more recently with composers including Michael Abels (Us), Kris Bowers (Green Book), Abel Korzeniowski (The Nun), and Heitor Pereira (Despicable Me 3), among others. He has served on the faculty of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music since 2011.
Jeremy Rollinson, CTO, Tour Tech Jeremy Rollinson has been thinking about creating and delivering technology solutions for live events around the world since 2006 and has had ties with TOURtech since the early days of the company. He says, “One day I was a regular Wi-Fi engineer, the next I was an Event Wi-Fi Engineer. It was at Latitude Festival in England and the local telco couldn’t connect the box office. The first, but by no means the last, critical problem we would solve using wireless technology.”
Devan Landau, Agent, Paradigm Talent Agency Devin Landau is an agent at Paradigm Talent Agency. He started out promoting underground electronic music in college while studying Anthropology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. In addition to promoting shows, he was playing in bands and quickly found himself booking the tours as well. After finishing his degree, he moved to Portland, OR where he joined the Surefire Agency in 2009 and became Senior Agent in 2012. Along with developing the DJ roster and live touring department at Surefire he quickly began working the Latin American market and has held consistent touring schedules in Central and South America for the last 8 years. In 2016, Devin joined The Windish Agency in Los Angeles, until they merged with Paradigm Talent Agency in January 2017, where he tours a diverse roster of bands, singers, producers and DJs. He has moderated and participated in panel discussions at SXSW, M pour Montreal, Frecuencias Conference in Santiago de Chile, Hermoso Ruido in Bogota, Colombia and the Selina International Music Summit in Medellín, Colombia.
Steven Homestead, President, American Composers Forum-LA Steven Homestead brings genre-spanning creativity to life, whether composing new music, incarnating large-scale art projects, or leading generative events. As the President of the American Composers Forum of Los Angeles (ACF-LA), Steven supports the development and appreciation of new music throughout Southern California, including work to launch the inaugural Compose LA. Steven’s music soars, plays, meditates, and reminisces. Recent performances include premieres under the direction of Christian Guebert, with Newgate Orchestra, and collaboration with soprano Linda Jackson at Oasis concert series. Steven earned his MM in Composition-Theory from CSUF, where he studied with Pamela Madsen. At UCLA, he received his BA studying composition with Paul Chihara, Roger Bourland, David Lefkowitz, and Ian Krouse. In the arts, Steven is the force behind multiple interactive installations, including work at the Festival of Arts, the Santa Ana Art Walk, Fuller Theological Seminary, and TEDxMission Viejo. He has also been a curator for Boca De Oro, Orange County’s literary festival. Overall, Steven’s creative work seeks to promote honor, give voice, share wonder, and develop unity.
