Awarded Failure Scholarship

In 2018, I was awarded the Denver, Colorado’s Museum of Contemporary Art Failure Scholarship, $10,000 given to high school seniors who “demonstrate a willingness to risk failure in the pursuit of something original and authentic … no matter how harebrained, impractical, or absurd.”

My winning entry was my first solo album, from my electroacoustic duo, Grotto. From 2016-2018 I spent nearly every weekday composing music on the way to high school while riding in the bumpy school bus. I produced the songs with recordings from drummer Nathaniel Ball. The album was self released and self promoted. I spent more than a thousand hours on sampling, resampling, processing, (field) recording, synthesizing, programming and creating a performance paradigm for those songs.

Colorado Public Radio did an inverview with me. You can hear the full interview here.