Dannielle Sturgeon currently works at Strong City Baltimore as the Advancement Services Specialist. She fundraises for Strong City’s projects and programs to help them reach their fundraising goals through a holistic approach including both institutional and individual funding strategies.
Previously, Ms. Sturgeon was the Institutional Giving Coordinator for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). At the BSO, she worked with foundations, government entities, and corporations to secure funding through grants and partnerships to support BSO general operations and programs.
Ms. Sturgeon has an active, freelance flute performance career. She has performed with the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra, Battle Creek Symphony, Kalamazoo Philharmonia, Kalamazoo Bach Festival, Baltimore Flute Choir, and more. In addition to performing, Ms. Sturgeon is an avid flute teacher. She also taught Kalamazoo College flute students as the adjunct flute instructor and currently has a small, private flute studio in Harford County, Maryland.
Ms. Sturgeon holds a Certificate in Nonprofit Leadership and Administration from Western Michigan University (2017), Master of Music from The Ohio State University (2013), and Bachelor of Music from Western Michigan University (2011).
David (Daoure) Diongue is a Baltimore-based Senegalese-American sound essayist, educator, and technologist.
David began learning saxophone and composition from Baltimore’s rich community of musicians. He attended Baltimore School for the Arts and earned his bachelor’s degree in jazz performance at Oberlin College & Conservatory. In addition, he won grants to study jazz in New Orleans and traditional Wolof music in Dakar, Senegal. Throughout this education, his teachers include Carl Grubbs, Kevin Robinson, Dr. Chris Ford, Tim Green, Kidd Jordan, Jamey Haddad, and Gary Bartz.
In addition to working at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Technology and teaching saxophone chamber music at BSA, David continues his artistic practice, evoking his homes of Baltimore and Senegal through sound. His work draws on his formal training as a saxophonist and the self-determining ethos of Black American Music.
A native of West Chester, Pennsylvania, Jeremy Lyons began studying the classical guitar at a young age with his father Glenn Lyons, who founded the classical guitar program at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. In addition to the guitar, Jeremy studied the cello with Ovidiu Marinescu and performed as a member of several orchestras and ensembles.
As a guitarist, Jeremy gives solo recitals throughout the United States and he has also appeared as a soloist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop, the Warminster symphony orchestra, and the Tallahassee symphony orchestra. Jeremy continues to perform on viola da gamba, lute, and Baroque guitar, and he regularly appears with his duo partner Soprano, Lisa Perry. While maintaining an active performing career, Jeremy is the current guitar instructor at Artist music education center in Perry Hall Maryland, and he also teaches guitar at the Levine School of Music in Washington D.C.
An advocate for contemporary music, Jeremy regularly writes music, collaborates with other composers, and enthusiastically participates in music that connects to a variety of audience members. He is a member of two Baltimore-based contemporary music ensembles: Mind on Fire and the Pique Collective. These ensembles explore the many sounds, sensations, experiences, and possibilities that arise from a performance, held in a public space, that invites the audience to immediately react and interact with the show that they attend.
Jeremy also delivers lectures concerning classical guitar history and the many influences that effect the repertoire of music available to the modern day guitarist. His research interests include pedagogical approaches to teaching the guitar, contemporary guitar literature, and the perception of a modern day guitarist as a musician.
Composer and musician Ruby Fulton (b. 1981) writes music which invites listeners to explore non-musical ideas through sound. Her musical portfolio includes explorations of mental illness, Buddhism, philosophy, psychedelic research, addiction, and chess strategy; and profiles of iconic popular figures like the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and musicians Syd Barrett and Whitney Houston. She has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects with thinkers and makers in the sciences and literary, movement and visual arts. She teaches composition and music theory at the University of Idaho Lionel Hampton School of Music.
An accomplished saxophonist and educator, Tyrone Page Jr. has had tremendous success working with composers and other musicians to expand contemporary saxophone repertoire. Actively involved in the performance of new works, Tyrone performs regularly in the Baltimore area and across the Eastern United States as a soloist, chamber, and orchestral musician. This season, Tyrone will premiere a new and extended version of Fluorescent Skeleton (after Jasper Johns, Regrets), which was written by James Young and premiered last Spring. Within the next year he will also premiere Wrath, which is a commissioned work for tenor saxophone and piano written by Stacy Garrop.
In competition, Tyrone was a Local Gold Medalist for the NAACP ACT-SO competition and competed in Los Angeles, winning the National Silver Medal for Instrumental Classical Music (2011). In 2012, Tyrone was granted the Hoffberger Foundation Scholarship through the Baltimore Scholars Program to attend the Peabody Conservatory. In 2014, Tyrone was selected by the Johns Hopkins Institution’s Diversity Leadership Council to receive a Diversity Recognition Award for his work with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids program and Peabody’s Black Student Union.
Tyrone is a graduate of the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied with Dr. Christopher Ford. He holds degrees in Saxophone Performance and Music Education at the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University. Tyrone is continuing his studies in saxophone with Gary Louie and conducting with Dr. Harlan Parker at the Peabody Conservatory.
James Young (CO-FOUNDER) is a texpat making music in Baltimore. He is a composer and improvisor, administrator and educator, human and show runner.
He has built, housed, or developed a number of musical projects and organizations which have led him across the states, at times as a teacher and at others as a performer. A majority of his work is as artistic director for Mind on Fire, a modular orchestra focused on living composers, showcasing artists in Baltimore, and access. Otherwise he is writing music.
He carries a doctorate in music composition, having devoted much of his life to studying the ability for organized sound to communicate and shape time. He has studied craft and musical thinking at Mass MOCA as part of the Bang on a Can Festival, June in Buffalo and Brevard, in Prague as part of the Czech-American Summer Music Institute, and at Peabody.
Gracie Carney is highly sought after as a contemporary and baroque musician. She has played in several world premieres including Marcos Balter’s Codex Seraphinius, “Imagined Worlds“, David Ludwig’s violin concerto, Paganiniana as well as Wake Up Gracie, a violin concerto written for her by Miggy Torres. In 2022, Ms. Carney performed the modern world premier of Regina Strinasacchi’s violin concerto on baroque violin.
Gracie Carney received her Bachelors and Performance Diploma degrees from Indiana University under the tutelage of Mauricio Fuks, Grigory Kalinovsky, and Stanley Ritchie. Since graduating from her Masters at McGill University with Violaine Melancon, she now performs with several ensembles on the east coast including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Mount Vernon Virtuosi, Mind on Fire, and Ensemble Caprice.
A passionate educator, Gracie has studied pedagogy with Brenda Brenner, Mimi Zweig, and Grigory Kalinovsky. Ms. Carney is an advocate for accessibility in classical music and is excited to work with ORCHkids.
Jamal R. Moore is a native of Baltimore Maryland who is a multi-instrumentalist, composer/performer, and educator.
His background includes California Institute of The Arts (M.F.A. 2012), Berklee College of Music (B.M 2005), Eubie Blake Jazz Orchestra (2000) under the direction of Christopher Calloway Brooks, and historically acclaimed Frederick Douglass Sr. High where notable alumni Thurgood Marshall, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Ennis graduated from.
Some notable luminaries Jamal has worked and recorded with are Wadada Leo Smith, Roscoe Mitchell, Nicole Mitchell, Archie Shepp, David Ornette Cherry, Tomeka Reid, Dr. Bill Cole, DJ Lou Gorbea, George Duke, Sheila E, David Murray, JD Parran, Ras Moshe, Hprizm, (Antipop Consortium) Tatsua Nakatani, Hamid Drake and the late Yahyah Abdul Majid (Sun Ra Arkestra).
He is an affiliate of The Pan African Peoples Arkestra of the late Horace Tapscott, Black Praxis of David Boykin, member of Konjur Collective, and co-creator of Ancestral Duo with Luke Stewart.
Jamal currently leads his own groups, Akebulan Arkestra, Napata Strings, Black Elements Quartet, Organix Trio, and Mojuba Duo.