Mark Doerries

Biography

Mark Doerries, conductor, composer, and performance artist, joins the University of Notre Dame as Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Music and Interdisciplinarity, and Lilly Conductor for the Notre Dame Children's Choir. He founded the Luminescence Project in 2004 for the composition and performance of multi-sensory music. The Luminescence Project has performed in the Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival and the Bloomington Arts Festival with additional installations mounted in New York City, Vancouver, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. Original productions include staged performances of PASSIONATE CONVICTIONS, an electrified rock oratorio based on JS Bach's St. John Passion, and Dreaming in Darkness, a vocal music and light-art production. As part of his interdisciplinary practice, Mark Doerries also designed integrated media for the University of São Paulo’s performance of Carmina Burana, and served as managing producer for the video-opera Unicamente la Verdad under the direction of Carmen Helena Téllez.

Recent and upcoming presentations on interdisciplinary performance practice include lectures at the 2013 American Choral Directors Association National Conference, the Modern Language Association, Festival 500 Choral Symposium, and the CUNY Graduate Theory Symposium on Music and Metaphor. Doerries’ research on chemosynthetic deep-sea ecosystems is published in the journals Deep-Sea Research and Marine Ecology.

As a conductor, Mark Doerries served as director of the Indiana University Children’s Choir Chamber Chorus, with which he also appeared  with the Bloomington Chamber Singers and with the Bloomington Early Music Festival.  He was also assistant conductor and chorus master to the Indiana University Opera Theater and Ballet, and intern conductor of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia. As guest vocalist, Doerries performed with New Music Ensemble of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. 

Doerries served as the Director of Choral and Vocal Music at Olney Central College and Music Director of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis before his appointment to Notre Dame.