Assistant Professor
Graduate Advisor in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry (2021-22)
yvette_jackson@fas.harvard.edu
Music Building 303-S
Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer of electroacoustic, chamber, and orchestral musics for concert, theatre, and installation. Previously a theatrical sound designer, she blends forms into an aesthetic of narrative soundscape composition, radio opera, and improvisation. She developed this style of composing as a way to pivot between creative practice and research while investigating how darkness, spatial audio, and interactivity affect the audience’s engagement with narrative in electroacoustic music listening experiences. Her radio opera Invisible People (2013), for example, responds to homophobia in African American communities; her 2018 radio opera Destination Freedom (premiered at the New Ear Festival in New York City) she describes as a “meditative electroacoustic experience that places the listener in the cargo hold of a ship transporting Africans to the Americas and traverses time in search of freedom.”
Jackson is a recipient of San Francisco’s Dean Goodman Choice Award for Sound Design and Theatre Bay Area’s Eric Landisman Fellowship. She studied music at the RD Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles, holds a BA in Music from Columbia University and a PhD in Music-Integrative Studies from the University of California, San Diego. She was the Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College for 2018–2019. Jackson joins the Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry graduate program and will also teach for Theater, Dance and Media (TDM).