Baker Artist Portfolios

Chris Mandra is a composer and performer whose work has been heard in Europe, Asia, Canada and the United States. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree in composition from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA; a certificate of study from the Liszt Ferenc Zeneakademia (Franz Liszt Academy) in Budapest, Hungary; two Master's degrees - one in music composition and one in computer music, both from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University where he also completed all of the coursework for a Doctor of Musical Arts degree before abandoning that program. From 1998 - 2003 he was responsible for the production of the National Public Radio website (http://npr.org), leaving that job after having been acting Vice President for half a year, Executive Producer for two years, and having co-created the critically acclaimed, and now more than a decade old show "All Songs Considered". During that same time period, he wrote and performed extensively with "Great Mutant Skywheel" - a group that had been called "a post-modern multi-media archetype for live musical performance." With Skywheel, Mandra produced two full-length CDs: "Glimpse at the Reflecting Pool" released in 2000 on sTRANGELYcOMPELLINGmUSIC and "make me a believer" released in 2003 on Gig Records. In 2004 Mandra was awarded a multi-week fellowship at STEIM in the Netherlands to work on a new interactive performance interface called "the manDrum (a tool he performs with and refines to this day)," he hosted, curated and performed in the monthly shows the "defDumbAndBass fREAKoUT" and "E+@13", both of which ran for 18 months. In 2005 his electronic alter-ego "kataStatik" was signed to "Unschooled Records" (oddly, he was signed for a concept album "velocityBomb" which the label never released) and in 2006 his EP "BLOW" spent a month on the CMJ top 20 electronic chart. In 2007 he began working at Intelligent Devices as part of a team of two, helping create internationally known and critically heralded audio processing software, while, at the same time, playing guitar, manDrum and singing in the beloved and head-turning, wholly original band TELESMA. With TELESMA, Mandra has released three albums "O(h)M" and "Hearing Visions: LIve", as well as the DVD "Hearing Visions: Live", the latter a concert movie documenting TELESMA's celebration of the 2008 winter solstice with world renowned visionary entheogenic artists Alex and Allyson Grey. In May of 2012 TELESMA released "action in inaction": and album called "unlike anything that came before it". He has logged more than 20,000 miles of touring and performing, seven thousand of those miles having occurred this two summers in a van with TELESMA. He is a faculty member and advisor for Goucher College's Master of Digital Arts, an Artist in Residence at the fidgetspace in Philadelphia, and lives in Fells Point.