BIOGRAPHY
Diedre L. Murray
A.R.T.: Best of Both Worlds (composer). Pulitzer Prize finalist, two-time OBIE Award winner, innovative composer, cellist, and producer. In the 1970s and 1980s, she pioneered the use of the cello as a jazz and new world music instrument touring extensively worldwide. Musical and theater works: Unending Pain, a choral/chamber work (copresented by the Performance Garage and the Whitney Museum of American Art); Let’s Go Down to the River, a score for octet,Willasau Jazz Festival in Switzerland; The Eves of Nhor, a string trio for National Dutch Radio and De Effenaar Festival in Eindhoven Holland; Kamerados, for mixed ensemble, TheWomen’s Improviser Festival in New York; Five Minute Tango, a score for the inaugural concert at the Danny Kaye/Sylvia Fine Playhouse, performed by the Manhattan Brass Quintet; The Conversation for the Seattle-based New Performance Group at theWalker Arts Center in Minnesota; You Don’t Miss theWater, a musictheater piece, in collaboration with noted poet Cornelius Eady, produced by the Music-Theatre Group (MTG); FANGS;Women In The Dunes, a dance piece created by Blondel Cummings for the Japan Society; the jazz-opera Running Man, for which she wrote the original story and score, and book with Cornelius Eady, Here Theatre in New York City (two OBIE Awards, finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama); music arrangements for Eli’s Coming (OBIE Award), Vineyard Theatre; In 2006 Ms. Murray composed the music for the Music Theater Group/KathrynWalker production of the Rage of Achilles and the Odyssey which was performed at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe; The Blackamour Angel, an opera written by Carl Hancock Rux, Bard College; an adaptation by Diane Paulus of James Baldwin’s Another Country, Columbia University; an adaptation of The VoiceWithin with Marcus Gardley, Harlem Stage and the Apollo Theatre. Current projects include a new musical, Sweet Billy and the Zooloo’s, with writer Lynn Nottage, for Colored Girl Productions; and Patient Zero, book by Cornelius Eady for the Music Theater Group for a production scheduled for 2012. Ms. Murray has received numerous grants and awards for her work as a composer. She received a B.S. degree from Hunter College in ethnomusicology, and has appeared on over 100 recordings as a cellist.