Nigel Maister is a director, writer, designer, and performer, and currently serves as the artistic director of the international theatre program at the University of Rochester. A founding member of the acclaimed new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, Nigel has staged, developed and/or designed concerts at venues throughout the country and internationally. He wrote the libretto for and directed I Was Here I Was I, a site-specific theatrical work created for the Temple of Dendur (with music by Kate Soper) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and performed his own text, Paper Trails (music by Stefan Freund), at the John Adams-curated In Your Ear Festival at Zankel Hall.
Nigel completed drafts of three projects during his MacDowell residency. Paper Pianos, which was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a libretto centering on the refugee experience as told through interviews with refugees from Iraq, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Somalia. The work, a commission by Alarm Will Sound (with music by Mary Kouyoumdjian), premiered at EMPAC in 2023. He also completed two libretti for young audiences: A Young Person's Guide to New Music and its companion piece, Anindi, Wilson, and the Super Super. Nigel is also a photographic artist and photo collector whose work has been exhibited nationally, and whose collection was the subject of a major exhibition at the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College in fall 2018.
