Composer/musician Alicia Svigals is the world's leading klezmer violinist and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, which she co-directed for 17 years. She has written for violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, playwright Tony Kushner, documentary filmmaker Judith Helfand, singer/songerwriters Debbie Friedman, Diane Birch et al, and has collaborated with them as a performer and improviser as well as with poet Allen Ginsburg, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Gary Lucas and Najma Akhtar, John Zorn, Marc Ribot, and many others. She has appeared on David Letterman, MTV, Good Morning America, PBS' Great Performances, NPR's Prairie Home Companion, Weekend Edition and New Sounds, and the soundtrack for the L-Word.
Svigals was awarded the Foundation for Jewish Culture's annual New Jewish Music Network Music Commission for her original live score to the 1918 film The Yellow Ticket, which she is currently touring, and a Trust for Mutual Understanding grant to bring that work to Poland next year. This past season she was a fellow at LABA -- a non-religious house of study and culture laboratory at the 14th St. Y in New York, which every year invites a group of artists to consider ancient texts and create work that pushes the boundaries of what Jewish art can be. While at LABA she composed a song cycle based on Yiddish poetry. She was at MacDowell in summer 2014, where she worked on her score to Brewsie and Willie, a film based on Gertrude Stein’s last book, to be released in 2015.
