Zachary James Watkins is a composer and electronic music artist. He will be visiting UC Davis’s music department several times over the 2021–22 school year, including a May 2022 performance of his piece Affirmative Action with The Living Earth Show (an artist-in-residence guitar and percussion duo), and working with graduate students in composition and creative writing for their collaborative performance work in late May 2022, titled “See / Hear / Say,” which is funded by the Davis Humanities Institute Research and Arts Clusters Grant.

Watkins has received commissions from Documenta 14, the Kronos Quartet, The Living Earth Show, sfsound, and the Seattle Chamber Players among others. His 2006 composition Suite for String Quartet was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition. Zachary has performed in numerous festivals across the United States, Mexico, and Europe and his band Black Spirituals opened for pioneering Drone Metal band Earth during their 2015 European tour. In 2008, he premiered a new multi-media work entitled Country Western as part of the Meridian Gallery’s Composers in Performance Series. Zachary completed Documentado / Undocumentado (Moving Parts Press, 2017), a multimedia interactive book in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez Peña, Gustavo Vasquez, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Felicia Rice. Zachary has been an artist-in-residence at the Espy Foundation, Djerassi, and the Headlands Center for The Arts.

Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb, and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, Zachary received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran, and Pauline Oliveros.

FREE

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• This performance and talk will not be recorded or livestreamed.