Son: team bios
The Mother: Tandum Lett
Tandum has toured extensively as a dancer in modern and African dance including with Marlies Yearby’s Movin’ Spirits, Tiye Giraud, Forces of Nature, LadyGourd Sangoma, Ladji Camara, Babacar MBaye, Lygya Barreto, Jean Leon Destine and Cynthia Oliver, and is an avid student and teacher of martial arts, including Tai Chi, Kung Fu and Capoeira Angola. After a career in dance performance, Tandum now works as an IT professional on Wall Street, and spends most of her spare time practicing and teaching Tai Chi and playing music with her family, her two teenagers and friends.
The Son: Noshi Norris
Noshi is a 15 year old musician from New York City. He plays violin, double bass, viola and a little cello and mandolin, and has toured as a musician with ‘A New York Lamentation’ produced by the Episcopal Archdiocese of New York and plays frequently around the city as a member of the Noel Pointer Foundation String Players. Noshi studies with Amadi Azikiwe and David Burnett and enjoys spending summers at classical music festivals and fiddle camp. Noshi is a 2018 recipient of the Daniel Pearl Memorial Award from the Mark O’Connor Fiddle camp, as well as a 2019 first place winner of the College of Staten Island Junior Division Strings competition. Noshi attends Brooklyn Technical High School and is exploring different kinds of engineering.
Editor: Abby Lee
A New York native, Abby Lee works as a Video Producer at Columbia Video Network, part of Columbia School of Engineering. At CVN, Abby creates promotional materials and educational video content for learners. Abby is also currently a part time illustrator and has worked on 2 children books for charity donations. Rainbow and Moon, written by actor Lindsay Jones, and illustrated by Lee was a collaboration effort with an Austin based multimedia company, Rooster Teeth. Previously, Abby has worked extensively with the Barnard Faculty to help create many prestigious projects such as a small video short From Parquet to Parterre, an experimental 360 demo, and working with dance filmmaker Gabri Christa as an editor and graphic designer. In her free time (if she has any), she is an advocate for animal rescues and an ant enthusiast.
Musician and Composer: Mazz Swift
Mazz Swift is a Juilliard-trained violinist, as well as composer, conductor, singer, bandleader and educator. As violinist and singer, she has performed on many of the world’s greatest stages including Royal Albert Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Müpa Budapest, and David Geffen Hall, Alice Tully Hall and Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center in New York City. As composer, Swift’s works include commissions by The Los Angeles Philharmonic, Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, and the Blaffer Foundation. As an educator, Swift has performed and taught workshops in free improvisation and “conduction” (conducted improvisation) on six continents and is a performing member and teaching artist with the acclaimed Silkroad Ensemble. She is also a Carnegie Hall teaching artist, where she writes and records lullabies with incarcerated mothers and mothers-to-be at Rikers Island, and coaches the inmates at Sing Sing Penitentiary on string studies and composition.
Improvisation is a throughline in Swift’s practice across genres and instrumental configurations, and as such, can be found in most of her works. She is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, continually creating orchestral compositions that involve Conduction, and solo works that are centered around protest and freedom songs, spirituals, and the Ghanaian concept of ‘Sankofa’: looking back to learn how to move forward.
Sound Design: Eve Cuyen
Eve Cuyen is an artist and a lover of all things film. She has a degree in music and is a sound designer, editor and cinematographer with award winning movies to her credit. Working mainly for an independent cinema and television, you can see her work projected in many film festivals in the United States and Europe. Her credits include Foreign Letters, Happy Hour, Living River, Our Hawaii, And Then Came Love, Twisted Fortune, Kali Ma, Zheng He for History International, The Sublet, a feature comedy and many more. Her full list of credits is available at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1993505/