UPDATE - I will be moving to San Francisco in June 2012 to take over as Director of Operations at Other Minds!

Saxophonist, composer, and improviser Michael Straus has firmly established himself as an important voice for contemporary and experimental music through his ongoing collaborations with visual artists, composers, robots, turntablists, conductors, dancers and instrumentalists around the world. He is founder of the multimedia performance project What are you looking at? and regularly performs with the chamber ensembles Moonrise Hernandez, quux, M2Duo, Portals of Distortion and EAR Duo. Michael has been featured artist at music festivals internationally with recent performances at New York City's The Stone, Detroit Symphony Orchestra's 8 Days in June Festival, Lisbon's Musicbox Nightclub, Minneapolis' Spark Festival of Electronic Music & Art, Berlin's Universität der Künste, Italy's Festival Internazionale del Sassofono, Oslo's New Interfaces for Music Expression Conference, Belgium's Logos Foundation, Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Ireland's Sonic Arts Research Center, Paris' Eglise Saint-Merri and Amsterdam's World Minimal Music Festival at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ.

As an educator, Michael has presented guest lectures for students at Yale University's Music & Technology Lab, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Amsterdam's STEIM, the University of Michigan's Performing Arts Technology Department, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Brandeis University, Denver University and the University of Miami among others. His recordings as a performer, composer and improviser can be heard on Innova, Everglade, EcoSono, SEAMUS, Audition Records, New Tertian and The Walter's Art Museum record labels. He is the recipient of a 2010 American-Scandinavian Foundation Creative Arts Grant (Oslo, Norway) and 2008–2009 J. William Fulbright Fellowship (Amsterdam, Netherlands) alongside two Peabody Career Development Grants, an American Composers Forum Encore Grant and Meet the Composer Creative Connections Grant. Michael holds M.M. degrees in saxophone performance and computer music from the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University and a B.M. in saxophone performance from Louisiana State University.