Shawn Jaeger

Executive Director

Shawn Jaeger is a composer, violinist, educator, and administrator who’s passionate about the community-building and healing power of the arts. He co-created Memory Remix—free workshops on making music with voicemails on cell phones—with music therapist, Renate Rohlfing, to facilitate belonging and process grief in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. And he’s served as a consultant for Spoleto Festival USA’s Tell Your Story initiative, which pairs the Festival’s Orchestral Fellows with Charleston community members to create new music, blending oral history and creative practice.

As an educator, Jaeger has served students from K-12 public-schools to doctoral candidates at Ivy-League universities. He’s taught at the Bard College Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division, Tufts University, Princeton University, Brown University, The New School, and Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School (PS 859). As a 2016-18 Princeton Arts Fellow, he developed and taught new courses on Sound and Place, Folk Music in the United States, Creating Collaboratively, and Music and Manifesto. He brought exciting guests to campus, including Gary Upay’aq Beaver, a Yup’ik drummer from Alaska, and Dom Flemons, co-founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

At Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School (PS 859), he taught classes in music theory, music history, composition, and improvisation—covering everything from Hildegard von Bingen to Lin Manuel Miranda. His pedagogy is inspired by writer bell hooks: we are all teachers and learners. At Bard College Conservatory of Music’s Preparatory Division, he served as Chair of Musicianship/Composition, redesigning the musicianship curriculum to focus on composition, and leading the New Music Ensemble in performances of music by Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman.

As a composer, Jaeger often focuses on folksong, field recording, and sonic ephemera to explore placemaking and memory. He's worked with Dawn Upshaw and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ekmeles, Aizuri Quartet, Longleash, and Contemporaneous. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall and Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, the Morgan Library, the Library of Congress, (Le) Poisson Rouge, Roulette, Jordan Hall, and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. He’s received commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Bard College, the American Composers Forum, the Jerome Foundation, the BMI Foundation/Concert Artists Guild, and Chamber Music America. His awards include the Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and two BMI Student Composer Awards.

As a violinist, Jaeger performs with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and more recently, in solo performances of his own music, including Hi, Chuck, an evening-length sonic memoir built around a cassette tape his mother recorded in 1990.

Jaeger holds a DMA from Northwestern University, and a BM from the University of Michigan. He lives in Brooklyn.