UM School of Music, Theatre & Dance

Assistant Professor of Performing Arts Technology
feelgood@umich.edu
734-615-3726

Professor Kirshner is a composer, performer, writer, and media artist who makes music-theater works that are an equal partnership among words, music, action, images, and ideas. Drawing on an eclectic background in jazz, classical composition, theater, dance, video, and performance art, Mr. Kirshner makes interdisciplinary compositions that explore areas of intersection among the traditional performing arts.

A trained composer, who has also studied singing and acting, Mr. Kirshner is often the principal performer of the pieces he creates. He studied composition with T. J. Anderson at Tufts University.

Mr. Kirshner received a Composer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to create The Watchtower, an opera-oratorio. The project was co-commissioned by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, and was premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City in 1991. A second National Endowment Project Fellowship and a residency at the MacDowell Colony funded his work on Who It Is, a series of musical monologues about race and American identity. The work premiered at the Museum of African American History in Detroit.

Mr. Kirshner was a Jacob Javits Fellow of the U.S. Department of Education and studied composition at the University of Michigan with William Bolcom, Michael Daugherty, George Wilson and Curtis Curtis-Smith. He received a N.E.A Composer’s Collaborative Fellowship to collaborate with video artist Mary Ellen Strom on a jazz-video song-cycle, entitled Poet’s Love. He has collaborated with choreographers Martha Bowers and Claire Porter, supported by the Mary Flagler Cary Trust Program for Music and Dance. Mr. Kirshner was named Hunting Family Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. Mr. Kirshner’s most recently completed project, Relive the Magic: An Evening with Tony Amore, was premiered and recorded by the Phoenix Ensemble, with Mr. Kirshner singing the title role.