Douglas R. Ewart is a Kingston, Jamaica native (b. 1946) and inimitable composer, improviser, inventor, visual artist, and educator. He is a 2020 New Music USA Project award recipient for “Douglas R. Ewart: Expressions,” his first comprehensive solo presentation in the US and which takes place as an installation and a series of virtual live concerts across multiple platforms.

As a seminal composer and musician, Ewart is internationally recognized as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which he joined in 1967 and served as the organization’s president from 1979-1986. He has toured with AACM and as part of countless additional music projects throughout Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia. As a featured artist, he has performed original music compositions with his numerous ensembles at the Moers International Festival (Germany), the University of Puerto Rico San Juan, throughout Brazil, Italy, Japan, and the US, and for multiple engagements in Tokyo, Perth, Havana, Paris, Stockholm, London, Düsseldorf, and Berlin.

A prestigious 1987 U.S.-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship supported his study of both modern Japanese culture and the traditional Buddhist shakuhachi flute. He has received a Bush Artists Fellowship and is a multiple-recipient of Minnesota Composers Forum/McKnight Foundation fellowships and Jerome Foundation grants.

He has applied his continual learning in philosophy to a thirty year-tenure with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, until retiring in 2016. As aprolific inventor and visual artist he has been presented by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smart Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry. An immersive, evolving installation in 2020 at ESS’s Audible Gallery includes his personal collection of historical artifacts, film, sculptures, and memorabilia, and illuminates Ewart’s current multimedia work, and new works created with members from the international creative arts and music communities.

For more information please visit https://douglasewart.com