MICRO BIO
Oni Buchanan is the author of four poetry books: Time Being (October 2020), Must A Violence (2012), Spring (2008), and What Animal (2003). She is the founder and director of Ariel Artists, a management company designed for musicians who are expanding and re-contextualizing classical music for the 21st century. In 2020, Buchanan launched the Ariel AVANT innovation platform, as well as the AR/VR/MR performance concourse, ImmerSphere.
(66 words. Updated December 2020. Please discard previously dated materials.)
SHORT BIO
Oni Buchanan is a poet, pianist, and the founder and director of the Ariel Artists classical music management company, including its innovation arm, Ariel AVANT, and its AR/VR/MR performance concourse, ImmerSphere. As a poet, Buchanan is the author of four books: Time Being (October 2020, University of Iowa Press, Kuhl House Poets), Must A Violence (2012, Kuhl House Poets), Spring (2008, University of Illinois Press), and What Animal (2003, University of Georgia Press). Winner of the National Poetry Series and the Massachusetts Book Awards, Buchanan's poems have been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, and have been published in over a hundred print and online literary journals. She also writes on the poetry typewriter assembly line of First Impression with four other award-winning Boston poets, creating impromptu custom-made poems for passersby. Buchanan herself toured as a concert pianist for over a decade, co-curated multiple large-scale interdisciplinary performance projects, and released five albums, with two additional albums forthcoming.
(159 words. Updated October 2020. Please discard previously dated materials.)
LONG BIO
Oni Buchanan is the founder and director of Ariel Artists, a classical music management company designed for innovative artists who are expanding and re-contextualizing classical/contemporary music for the 21st century. In 2020, Buchanan broadened the Ariel universe by launching the Ariel AVANT innovation platform, functioning as an open invitation to classical musicians and chamber ensembles across the sector to push forward the evolution of classical music as an art form, and supported by visionary concert presenters, industry thought leaders, and Ariel Artists roster artists. In July 2020, Buchanan publicly launched ImmerSphere, Ariel's new and rapidly evolving platform for augmented/virtual/mixed-reality performance.
In her role as a business person and practicing artist with a high-level background in both piano and poetry, Buchanan delivers frequent talks and workshops on re-envisioning the business model for the arts, entrepreneurial business skills, artist management, and artistic collaboration, and has presented at national and international industry conferences such as Chamber Music America and PAC Australia, at art orgs such as the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston, and at numerous universities across the country.
Buchanan is also a published poet. Her fourth book, Time Being, is just out from the University of Iowa Press's acclaimed Kuhl House Poets series as of October 15, 2020. Her first three poetry books – Must A Violence (2012, Kuhl House Poets), Spring (2008, University of Illinois Press), and What Animal (2003, University of Georgia Press) – are winners of the National Poetry Series, the Massachusetts Book Awards, and the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series competition. Buchanan's poems have been selected for numerous anthologies including The Best American Poetry, The Arcadia Project, The Golden Shovel Anthology, and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, among others, and have been published in over a hundred print and online journals, including Bennington Review, Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Conduit, Seneca Review, Gulf Coast, American Letters & Commentary, Fence, jubilat, Verse Magazine, and many more. Her large-scale kinetic poem, “The Mandrake Vehicles,” is included in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 (ELC2), published by MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities). She also writes on the poetry typewriter assembly line of First Impression with four other award-winning Boston poets, creating impromptu custom-made poems for passersby.
Buchanan herself toured as a concert pianist for over a decade, with programming that was often interdisciplinary in nature, directly engaging the intimate connections between the arts. She frequently performed and commissioned new works, programming them in concert alongside canonical repertoire with the goal of illuminating the fascinating conversations across time between otherwise radically different works and composers. In addition to solo programming, Buchanan has co-curated (with poet Jon Woodward) multiple large-scale interdisciplinary performance projects. Their first project, “Machines,” featured the machines and films of kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson exhibited alongside live performances of matched contemporary musical works. They then produced “Four Quartets: Variations,” moored by the performances of four vocalizing actors and four poets interacting with excerpted and remixed text of T. S. Eliot. More recently, they commissioned a concert-length work for piano, spoken text, and electronics from renowned electroacoustic composer John Gibson. The piece, called Uncanny Valley (after Jon Woodward’s serial poem of the same name), was given its world premiere at the University of Michigan, and saw performances throughout the country at venues including Smith College, Harvard University, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Iowa Center for New Music, CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) at UC Berkeley, the Sonic Frontiers series at University of Alabama, and many others. Buchanan has released five solo piano albums to date. Her sixth commercial album, a recording of the commission Uncanny Valley, is due out in 2021.
Buchanan received her Master’s degree in piano performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her Bachelor’s degrees in both music and English from the University of Virginia, and conducted three years of her music studies at the University of Iowa School of Music while pursuing her poetry M.F.A. Her piano teachers have included Russell Sherman, Patricia Zander, Daniel Epstein, Stephen Drury, Uriel Tsachor, and Mimi Tung, and her poetry teachers include Jorie Graham, Mark Levine, Heather McHugh, Susan Wheeler, Charles Wright, Rita Dove, Lisa Russ Spaar, and others.
(712 words. Updated October 2020. Please discard previously dated materials.)