Phil Winsor

Biographical Sketch

Phil Winsor

Website - http://www.opticmuse.com Email - PGWinsor@aol.com

Born in Morris, Illinois, Phil Winsor holds degrees from Illinois Wesleyan University and San Francisco State University; he has done graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley and doctoral studies at the University of Illinois,

For the past thirty years he has pursued dual professions as music composer and multimedia artist/photographer. His traditional and experimental photographic prints have been exhibited at galleries in the United States and the Republic of China, including the Chicago Gallery of Photography and Exposures Gallery in Evanston, the Afterimage Gallery in Dallas, and the Sun Gat Gallery in Taipei.

From 1968 to 1982 Winsor lived in Chicago, where he developed an interest in multimedia art through extensive collaboration with filmmaker Tom Palazzolo and the Chicago Contemporary Dance Theater, with whom he toured as resident composer and musical director. While in Chicago he served as director of the Electronic Music Studio at DePaul University. In 1980, along with Peter Gena, he founded the Chicago Interarts Ministry, a performance art ensemble and venue. During this period he was awarded two National Endowment for the Arts Composition Fellowships, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and two Illinois Arts Council Composition Fellowships. In 1982 he moved to the Dallas area to join the faculty of the University of North Texas, where his collaboration began with choreographer Shelley Cushman. From 2004 – 2009 he was in residence at National Chiao Tung University, where he established their first Computer Music Technology Graduate curriculum.

Phil Winsor’s intermedia works for computer and human performers have been performed at galleries and universities in the USA and Europe, and his compositions employing graphic notational techniques are part of the traveling exhibition, Eye Music, which toured European art galleries during 1986-87 under the auspices of the British Arts Council. During 1991 he had one-man shows of his Luce Libera Series in Kaoshung and Taipei, Taiwan. (Examples of this series of experimental photographs are in the private collections of many individuals as well as corporations such as Texas Instruments.) Between 1989 and 1992 he was awarded three Computer Music Research Grants by the National Science Council of the Republic of China, where he assisted in the development of Southeast Asia's first computer music research facility at National Chiao-Tung University. In 1996 was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Composition Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy.

He is the author of four books on computer music, published by McGraw-Hill Company and the University of North Texas Press. His music is recorded on Advance and Brewster LPs, and three Centaur label Compact Disks. His music is published by Carl Fischer, Inc. and the Whole>Sum Press.