Atlanta Musicians
Since 2020, we've invited local Atlanta artists and musicians to perform alongside our Guthman Musical Instrument Competition finalists in concert. Our resident artists include professional musicians as well as members of the Georgia Tech community.
Meet this year's partnering musicians.
Majid Araim
Majid Araim is an Iraqi-American multi-instrumentalist, composer, educator, curator, visual artist, researcher and a fixture of the Atlanta improvisation and new music communities. Majid's prolific work as a composer focuses on resonance and dynamics, experimental approaches, and is oriented towards the natural world and re-imaginings thereof.
Anthony Cammarota
Anthony Cammarota is a guitarist, composer, and educator whose work bridges performance, technology, and creative research. Drawing on an eclectic stylistic background, he combines traditions of jazz, electroacoustic, and popular music forms. Passionate about redefining traditional instruments and performance modalities, he seeks to create inventive connections between technology and musical expression. His research explores interactive music systems, sound design, and algorithmic composition, with a focus on integrating software and alternative interfaces into live performance. As an educator, Anthony has served as chair of the guitar department at the True School of Music in Mumbai, India, and as adjunct faculty at the University of Central Missouri. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds an M.A. from the University of Central Missouri, B.Mus. from Cornish College of the Arts, and is an alumnus of the Orange County High School of the Arts.
İpek Eginli
İpek Eginli is a Turkish-American experimental sound artist and pianist/improviser whose work blends electroacoustic free improvisation on piano, voice, modular synthesizers, and no-input mixing boards. Her performances are often described as adventurous, daring, playful, and vibrant, shifting effortlessly between organic and mechanical sounds to evoke emotions ranging from tender and soft to dark and explosive. Eginli’s electroacoustic solo debut album, Field Recording in a Black Hole (WeirdCry Records), and live improvised duo album Explorers with cellist Daniel Levin (EyesAndEars Records) launched in 2024, followed by her third album Clouds Carry Me to the Sky in 2025, which received recognition from BBC Radio.
Her international presence continues to expand, with tours planned across the U.S. and Europe and participation in festivals such as the Northwestern New Music Festival and Memphis Concrete. In 2025, Eginli was selected for the Medusai AI collaboration at the Goat Farm in Atlanta and toured with the European Music Collective. She has also held residencies at Sonoscopia in Portugal and the Hambidge Center in Georgia. In 2024, she returned to Turkey for workshops and performances at Istanbul Technical University, Bahçeşehir University, and Bilgi University’s New Music Festival.
As an educator and entrepreneur, Eginli founded PianoAlpharetta, a leading piano academy in Georgia with over 400 students. She holds a DMA in piano performance, master’s and bachelor’s degrees in piano, and certifications from the National Federation of Music Clubs and the Royal Conservatory, teaching students of all ages for over 20 years.
Will Hamilton
Iriamu is the multi-disciplined art project of Will Hamilton. In his music, Iriamu uses found sounds, everyday noises, synths, percussion, guitars, and his primary instrument, bass guitar. He melds the “noises” creating sonic soundscapes to express emotions, and tell his story. A modern day Griot.
Iriamu has shared his ideas on numerous EPs that are free form and not structured, along with four full-length albums, Toulon, a Travel Journal, The Shape of Iriamu to Come, Reflections: Pieces of a Man, and The Freak Flag Freedom Party for Exploratory Creativity & Freedom of One’s Mind. The latter serving as a springboard to a community driven, socio-political party founded by Iriamu. The FFFP promotes community, promotion and support for all creative people.
Iriamu is the founder of the community driven, socio-political party, the Freak Flag Freedom Party for Exploratory Creativity & Freedom of One’s Mind. Iriamu is a co-curator of Monday Night Creative Music, a weekly series hosted at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery in Atlanta, GA. He is also a partner in the instrumental music festival, based in Atlanta, NoWordsATL.
Klimchak
Klimchak builds and plays unusual musical instruments, using them to compose electro-acoustic music for film, theater, dance and live performance. Favorite performances include a live score for Peter Brooks Conference of the Birds at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse in New Hampshire (2022), playing live music on a theremin bike for the solo piece, Pied Pipers Payback for Art in Odd Places Orlando (2016), and LeBeato Lounge: Water Wonderland, a concert for homebuilt instruments that use water as part of their design for Art on the Atlanta Beltline (2022).
In March, 2015, Klimchak premiered his solo show, CooksNotes, in which he makes music on kitchen implements while cooking dinner for the audience. Favorite dance compositions include The Evolution Project with choreographer Lori Teague at Emory University, and Three Bagatelles for the Righteous performed at NYC’s Joyce Theater by Jane Comfort and Co. Favorite theater work includes The Navigator at the Goat Farm & Titus Andronicus at Georgia Shakespeare (both of which were winners of Atlanta's Suzi Bass awards for best sound design). More info at klimchakmusic.com.
Jeremy Muller
Jeremy Muller (jeremymuller.com) is a percussionist, composer, and multimedia artist. He’s been described as “highly creative” by Take Effect and has performed as a featured soloist at many venues throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia including International Computer Music Conference, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Transplanted Roots, MoxSonic, NYCEMF, ZeroSpace, Southwest Electroacoustic Festival, Jacksonville Electroacoustic Music Festival, IEEE VIS conference, Art on the ATL BeltLine, Balance-Unbalance International Conference, the Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, and PASIC. He has given world premieres of works by many composers including Matthew Burtner, Alexandre Lunsqui, Cristyn Magnus, and an evening-length tour de force solo work by Stuart Saunders Smith. Jeremy released his debut solo percussion album on Albany records which includes several world premieres, and his music can also be heard on Arcomusical’s third album “Emigre & Exile.”
Tristan Peng
Tristan Peng is a Music Technology PhD student at the Georgia Institute of Technology exploring interaction design, spatial audio, and sonification; previously studying at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) in the Music Department at Stanford University. A creative technologist and musician, his work aims to democratize music through technology — creating accessible, artful, and interactive ways for people to experience sound. His current projects investigate how data can become a medium for participation and how immersive audio spaces can evoke emotion and understanding in ways that traditional visualizations cannot.
Ben Shirley
Benjamin Shirley is a musician, composer, educator, and organizer based in Atlanta, GA. Primarily a cellist, Benjamin has sought to incorporate his love of avant-garde jazz, old-time fiddle, and experimental music into a dynamic, creative, and personal vernacular, and has played with Whispers of Night, Faun and a Pan Flute, Mute Sphere, BASrelief, Artifactual String Unit, and in a duo with saxophonist Jeff Crompton. In addition to co-leading the Atlanta Improvisers Orchestra, he has performed with ensembles such as Bent Frequency, Atlanta Contemporary Ensemble, and the Albany, GA Symphony Orchestra, and at festivals including Big Ears in Knoxville, TN, Atlanta’s SoundNOW new music festival, and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center’s {Re]Happening. A devoted student and teacher of music, Benjamin continues to garner inspiration from the music traditions of the past, while pursuing a musical life aimed at the future horizons of creativity.
Alexandria Smith
Praised by The New York Times for her “appealingly melancholic sound” and “entertaining array of distortion effects,” Alexandria Smith is a multimedia artist, audio engineer, scholar, trumpeter, and educator that enjoys working at the intersection of all these disciplines. Her creative practice and research interests focus on building, designing, theorizing, and performing with wearable electronics that translate embodied, biological data into interactive sonic and visual environments. To explore how electronic music is embodied through practice, she has been experimenting with ways to integrate biofeedback training and sensor observation into her electronic music, build controllers that go beyond keyboards and drum pads, and perform with interactive visual environments. Her research in this interdisciplinary area was recently published in Arcana Musicians on Musicians X and presented at MOXsonic.
In Fall 2023, Alexandria Smith joined the faculty at Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor of Music Technology. She recieved her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and holds an M.M. and B.M. from Mannes the New School for Music.
Katie Young
Katherine Young makes electroacoustic music and sonic art using expressive noises, curious timbres, and kinetic structures. Relationship building and ecological thinking are central to her practice. She has worked closely with Yarn/Wire, Wet Ink, Linda Jankowska, Weston Olencki, Jessica Pavone, and others. The LAPhil, Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW, Paramirabo, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Third Coast Percussion, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, and others have commissioned her music and installation work.
As a bassoonist and improviser, Katherine amplifies her instrument and employs a flexible electronics setup. She performs as a soloist, in ad hoc improvised groups, and with projects such as Beautifulish (with Sam Scranton). She has documented her work on numerous recordings, including several with Anthony Braxton. Her work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition and the Fromm Foundation. Katherine lives in Atlanta and teaches at Emory University.