VARGAS, Melissa

Composer, teacher, manager and improviser with a special interest in contemporary and experimental music. She studied Musical Arts and completed a master's degree in Artistic Studies at the FASAB District University – Bogotá. Her works have been presented on numerous stages in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania, by performers from different parts of the world.

Her sound cosmos explores the relational, austerity, different approaches to the perception of temporality and the expansion of gesture. In recent years she has worked on two concepts that she has developed simultaneously, influenced by the affective turn and decolonial studies: the "communal sound space" and "intimate electronics", both aimed at imagining possibilities in collective listening from musical creation.

She is director of the Women in New Music Festival and curator of the cycle. She researches women composers in Latin America and Colombia, and, as a member of the Colombian Circle of Contemporary Music, she is the director of the radio program Inmerso on Radio UNAL. She is a member of mygla (Music and Gender – Latin American Studies Group), of redCLa (Network of Latin American Women Composers), of the collective Resonantes Col and of free music, which address the problems of Gender-Based Violence and music, and of Sonar – rural sounds and narratives.

She has written from and about music in various publishing spaces, she has also been a jury in calls and/or competitions for different institutions such as MinCulturas Colombia, Atlanticxs, IDARTES, Bogotá Philharmonic, BanRep Cultural, the FMMN, among others.

She considers music and composition as a way of knowing the world.