In 2021 the Sarah Isom Center and the Department of Music collaborated, along with Living Music Resource, to establish the Sarahfest Artist-in-Residence Program with the goal of providing UM students with the unique opportunity to learn from working professional artists. The program’s inaugural artists-in-residence were the singer Kelly Hogan and musician (and Decemberist member) Jenny Conlee. The two artists auditioned UM students and worked with the chosen cohort to form a band they collectively named “The Bored of Education.” Students rehearsed and practiced with the two artists, who served as their professional mentors. For Hogan and Conlee learning was a two-way street. Like their students, they learned new material too, which they performed with their bandmates in a stellar public concert.

In 2022 we welcomed visual artist Valerie George to campus for a residency focused on “The Art of Process in Creating” which gave a new cohort of students the invaluable opportunity to engage with visual art, sound, experimentation, and acts of collaboration in a truly integrated way.

The Fall 2023 Artist-in-Residence we welcomed Elizabeth Ito. She has been working as a creator, writer, director, and storyboard artist in the animation industry since 2004. She’s worked on TV, feature, and commercial projects.

Marilyn Shrude will serve as the first spring Artist-in-Residence. She is a composer whose music is characterized by its warmth and lyricism, rich timbre, multi-layered constructions, and complex blend of tonality and atonality. The result is a bright, shimmering and delicately wrought sound world that is at once both powerful and fragile. Her concentration on color and the natural resonance of spaces, as well as her strong background in Pre-Vatican II liturgical music, give the music its linear, spiritual, and quasi-improvisational qualities.