Sugar Vendil
Composer, Piano
Sugar Vendil is a composer, pianist, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking, known as Brooklyn. She started her artistic life as a classical pianist, and after spending nearly a decade searching for her own voice, her practice evolved into writing her own music and making performances that integrate sound, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano. She writes and performs her own solo music for piano and electronics and has a keyboard/synth duo, Vanity Project, with composer Trevor Gureckis. Vendil is a proud second generation Filipinx American.
Vendil was awarded a 2021 MAPFund grant to support Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia. Recent commissions include Chamber Music America to write a new work for her ensemble, The Nouveau Classical Project, which she founded in 2008; ETHEL’s Homebaked 2019 for Unsacred Geometry, and ACF | Create to write for Box Not Found.
Vendil loves dancing and collaborating with other makers. In September 2020, she danced in choreographer Emily Johnson/CATALYST’s The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better – Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s) at Socrates Sculpture Park. She is part of Johnson’s Being Future Being, which showed at Bates Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow in July 2021, and will premiere at The Broad Stage in 2022. Vendil took part in premiering composer-saxophonist Darius Jones’ LawNOrder at The Stone and Being Caged in ICE (2018) at Roulette.
She has performed at a variety of venues, ranging from arts spaces such as BAM Fisher, Dixon Place, Knockdown Center’s Ready Room, MoMa PS1, National Sawdust, the New School’s Glassbox Theater, The Stone, and Roulette; to galleries and spaces such as The Development Gallery, Milk Studios, and Spring Studios.
Vendil is an advocate of the oxford comma, is obsessed with her cat Coco, and has an excellent memory.
Photo Credit: Julia Comita