Graduate student composer Trey Makler has received a 2023 Creator Fund Award from New Music USA, an organization that has for more than ten years supported composers, musicians, and organizations with grants so they can create new works and build community. The Creator Fund recently celebrated ten years by doubling the number of awards given, with more than half of the awardees identified as being women, nonbinary, or transgender. This year, the grant program aims to “stimulate creativity and collaboration between music creators and other artists from any discipline or background, and to build community in response to the restrictions of recent years.” This grant will support the development of Trey’s immersive site-specific opera, Waiting Rooms, which considers the AIDS crisis and its current state through the perspectives of survivors, archival documents, and community-contributed materials.