François Lamontagne began his cello studies with David Ellis at the Conservatoire de Musique de Saguenay and then at McGill University under the tutelage of Elizabeth Dolin, where he has received the “Student Excellence Award” scholarship and the Frank Mills Prize. In 2022, he earned his bachelor’s degree with the distinction of “outstanding achievement in cello performance” and his master’s degree, in 2025.

Since 2025, François is principal cellist in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean Symphony Orchestra and assistant-principal the Orchestre symphonique de l’Estuaire. He also plays with the Orchestre de l’Agora and the Orchestre symphonique de Québec.

François has distinguished himself in various competitions, such as the Festival du Royaume and the Canadian Music Competition. He won the “Jeunes solistes” competition of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean Youth Orchestra. In 2018, he was awarded the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal and the Governor General’s Medal as part of his collegial diploma at the conservatory.

Passioned about chamber music, he studied string quartet under the guidance of renowned ensembles such as the Alban Berg string quartet, Quatuor Ébène, and Quatuor Danel at the McGill International Sring Quartet academy. François has also played internationally in the Fischoff Competition (USA), the Schiermonnikoog Festival (Netherlands), and the Trondheim Chamber Music Academy in Norway.

François Lamontagne was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.

KALAISAN KALAICHELVAN is a composer and musician based in New York. His compositional practice spans multiple disciplines, drawing from film, dance, theatre, installation and deals with themes of translation and transference.

Named by Ludwig Van as one of “six emerging Canadian composers to keep an eye on” and Playback’s 10 to Watch, his music has been performed and premiered by celebrated ensembles such as Glenn Gould New Music Ensemble, the Dior Quartet, NMC Ensemble and Extended Music Collective. He has held residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, NewAm Composers Lab, UCross Foundation, Avaloch Farm Music Institute, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Kalaisan is a 2021 Fellow of the Sundance Composers lab and is one of the awarded grantees of the Sundance Institute’s Art of Practice Fellowship. He was awarded the SOCAN Emerging Composer Award in 2023 and 2024. He was also awarded the esteemed Kathleen McMorrow Award by the Ontario Arts Foundation in 2024 for the composition and presentation of contemporary classical music in Ontario. In 2023, Kalaisan wrote the music for the film In Flames, which was selected as the Pakistani entry for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards. Kalaisan has scored feature films that have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. He is currently working on various commissions and scoring a new Netflix series directed by Simon Barry.

Kalaisan has been mentored by esteemed composers and music leaders such as Christopher Cerrone, Huang Ruo, Suzanne Farrin, Brian Current, Paul Wiancko and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet. Having worked across various disciplines and communities of thought, Kalaisan seeks to bring together incongruous institutions to build novel structures that reflect his artistic upbringing.

Kalaisan Kalaichelvan was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.

Robyn Jacob is a composer, pianist, vocalist and educator living and working from the unceded territories of the Sḵwxwú7mesh, Xwməθkwəyəm and Səl’il’wətaʔ Nations, also known as Vancouver. She has written music for ensembles such as Grammy winning Third Coast Percussion (Chicago),Architek Percussion (Montreal), Grammy winning Sō Percussion (Brooklyn), Chor Leoni (Vancouver), and the Victoria Symphony, and has collaborated with visual artists and instrument makers. Her avant-pop project Only a Visitor (Mint Records) has toured internationally and released four albums to date. She has released two albums with her duo project The Giving Shapes in collaboration with harpist Elisa Thorn. Her new solo project Immix explores the emotive narratives of voice and electronics. From 2012 - 2024 she was part of the multi-disciplinary art collective Publik Secrets, whose work included a variety of public space interventions, performances, installations and ephemeral gatherings, including Gamelan Bike Bike, which she co-led with artist and composer George Rahi for over ten years.

Robyn Jacob was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.

Canadian clarinetist Dr. Liam Hockley is a versatile performer and passionate advocate for new and experimental music. Described as “a musician for whom alternative or avant-garde approaches to his instrument are only part of the everyday tool kit” (Georgia Straight), he is equally fluent in classical and contemporary idioms, with a repertoire spanning the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. His appearances across three continents include prize-winning performances at the Stockhausen-Konzert und Kurse Kürten.

Liam’s debut solo album Pulse-Tide was named one of The Wire’s 10 best Modern Classical releases of 2024, which praised it as “at once vigorous and forensic, grappling with this music’s overall physicality, while also paying microscopic attention to its fine details, its agitated particles and molecular trails.” Forthcoming releases include a collaborative project with composer Ray Evanoff and an EP of solo improvisations with electronics.

Liam holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia, where his SSHRC-supported research explored performer agency in complexist music. His writing has appeared in The Clarinet and FOCI Arts/Words, and he maintains an active performing career across British Columbia, including as clarinetist with the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra.

Liam Hockley was generously supported by the Lucy and Stephen Maxym Endowment.

Amy Hillis has “a rich, warm sound and has mastered the violin with such ease, that it is impossible to ignore her passion in performance” (Ludwig Van Montréal). She challenges artistic norms to build community relationships inside and outside the concert hall. As a soloist, Amy has commissioned Canadian works by Luis Ramirez, Matt Brubeck, Fjóla Evans, Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière, Laurence Jobidon, Vincent Ho, Andrew Staniland, Jocelyn Morlock, Nicole Lizée, Carmen Braden, Randolph Peters and Jordan Pal. She is winner of the Pan-Canadian Recital Tour, the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition, the Canada Council Musical Instrument Bank competition on two occasions, an artistic residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the McGill Concerto Competition, and the Sylva Gelber Foundation Music Award. A passionate chamber musician, she is a founding member of the meagan&amy duo with pianist, Meagan Milatz, and the Horizon String Quartet (HSQ) which has performed over 200 schools shows for young audiences across Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Amy is currently Associate Professor of Community Music at York University and the Artistic Director of the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto. amyhillis.com

Amy Hillis was generously supported by the Lewitt Family Foundation Artist Award.

Oliver Hanane is a percussionist, composer and artist from Melbourne, Australia. His creative practice takes a multidisciplinary lens to the creation of music, blending performance, composition and visual art, using this approach to illustrate his artistic intention. His work is rooted in experimental composition and performance seeking to explore textures and sonic possibilities.
Originally from a contemporary jazz background, his musical style blends pointillistic, repetitious, and metallic textures influenced by contemporary classical percussion. Oliver has been an active figure within Melbourne’s contemporary jazz music scene, playing at venues such as Jazzlab, Federation Square, The Croxton, and such festivals as Moomba, White Night, Strawberry Fields and Rainbow Serpent. Throughout his career he has collaborated with a diverse range of ensembles and individuals that have shaped his musical style including collaborations with ex-Egypt 80 member Olugbade Okunade and Melbourne based pianist Katarzyna Witorski.
During his studies in Indeterminate composition methodologies, Oliver developed a particular interest in fusing graphic scores and storytelling components inherent within music, investigating how when combined these elements can enhance the experience as a performer and as a viewer. This exploration reflects his broader impetus to test the boundaries of traditional methods of music making and performance. 

Oliver Hanane was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.

Crossing boundaries is a feature of Hannah Epperson’s life and music—from residence in the US and Canada to more than 300 live performances in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Singled out by Bandcamp as “one of the most stunningly unconventional artists making music today,” renowned musicologist/critic Ted Gioia chose her debut album Upsweep as one of the Top 3 recordings of 2016, calling it “unique, haunting, addictive.” Classically trained, her genre-bending violin looping and singing was enriched by apprenticeships with the fiddler of acclaimed Deseret String Band and studio work and performances with Fleet Foxes, Dirty Projectors, Julianna Barwick and Ry X. A graduate in Human Geography, a member of Canada’s world champion Ultimate Frisbee Team, Hannah embodies music as a bridge, gathering soundscapes and people together in transfiguring moments of live and studio performances.
 

Hannah Epperson was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.

Violinist and arts administrator Lauren Conroy is a New York City-based musician who is passionate about performing, programming, and producing contemporary music in dynamic, multidisciplinary contexts. An avid performer of new music, she is a member of the BlackBox Ensemble and a co-founder of the Magpie Duo. She is currently the Company Manager for Ariel Rivka Dance.  
Lauren has been invited to several festivals and residencies including Toronto Summer Music Fellowship, Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Norfolk New Music Workshop, Bowdoin International Music Festival Fellowship, Avaloch Farm Music Institute, and The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Lauren is a graduate of The Juilliard School where she completed her Master of Music and was the Departmental Assistant at The Juilliard School’s Center for Innovation in the Arts. After graduating from Juilliard, she then attended NYU and completed her Master of Arts in Contemporary Musical Arts Performance and Administration as a Koppenaal Scholar. At NYU, she was granted the Dean’s Award for Summer Research where she was a resident scholar at The John Cage Trust at Bard College.

Lauren Conroy was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.

Rainbow Chan is an award-winning vocalist, producer and multi-disciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her practice bridges popular music and contemporary visual arts, exploring themes of cultural representation, (mis)translation, matrilineal histories and diasporic heritage. Central to her work is the research and reimagining of women’s oral traditions, particularly the fading bridal laments of Weitou women, Hong Kong’s first settlers, to whom she has deep ancestral ties. Through pop music, performance and immersive installations, she translates these endangered songs into contemporary art forms, preserving their subversive feminist voices while reflecting on loss, resilience and solidarity. She is particularly interested in the power of ritual, song and performance as both a means of reclaiming agency and a living archive.

Rainbow Chan was generously supported by the Banff Centre Endowment.

Justin Wright is a composer, cellist, and multidisciplinary artist from Montreal. Wright’s music is characterized by a seamless blending of avant-garde approaches and timbral experimentation with the evocative and meditative spirit of folk and sacred music traditions. Classical concert halls, underground loft venues, art museums, pop music venues, planetariums, and the glaciers of the High Arctic have all comfortably been home to his performances, a reflection of his defiance of traditional categorization and wide-ranging artistic interests. Wright’s primary composition tools, for both electronic and acoustic music, are his cello, Ableton Live, a modular synthesizer, and a 4-track tape machine. His recent work aims to reengage with his scientific past as well as expand into other media such as film, photography, and DIY technology. Wright holds a BSc and MSc in molecular biology, and is currently a PhD candidate in music composition at Princeton University primarily studying under Tyondai Braxton and Donnach.

Justin Wright was generously supported by the Lewitt Family Foundation Artist Award.