Dana Reason is a composer, improviser, keyboardist, conceptual artist, producer, and researcher, with a Ph.D. in Critical Studies and Experimental Practices from the University of California, San Diego. Her focus is on performance, improvisation, composition, scoring, and research in new and emergent musical fields. Her dissertation: The Myth of Absence: Representation, Reception, and the Music of Experimental Women Improvisors focuses on the following artists; ethnographies; and modes of sound making. Research was mentored and supervised by George E. Lewis:
As a performing artist working at the intersections of twentieth and twenty-first-century musical genres and intermedia practices, she moves easily between genres encompassing a dynamic stylistic range and repertoire.
She has been featured on more than 20 commercially released recordings, including as a member of The Space Between Trio with American electronic arts pioneer Pauline Oliveros.
As a film composer, performer, and arranger, Reason has created music for a variety of genres, including film, theatre, games, and large and small ensembles.
She created the original film scores for: The Wonder and the Worry (2024), Directed by David Baker; The Snowbird (Cinema’s First Nasty Women Collection); Back to God’s Country (1919) featuring Nell Shipman for Kino Lorber Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers.
Her piece Folded Subjects: Olive Rose premiered at McGill University in 2017. Her sound-art sculpture, UnHeard, premiered at CEI Artworks in 2016.
Her conceptual, social, and political work: Tea & Fences: A Quiet Tea Party (2017) premiered at the Santa Monica library and is part of the collection of works: Propositional Attitudes (Golden Spike Press, 2018), edited by performance and visual artists: John Burtle and Elana Mann.
Tea and Fences performed via Skype with Mate Beboudi (Tehran) & Dana Reason (Oregon) with live audience in Santa Monica (2017)
Tea and Fences was also performed at Site/Less ( via Skype with Ivan Manzanilla in Mexico, and Dana Reason in Oregon & audience in Chicago). She toured as a musician for Heart of a Forest tour in 2016 by Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and appears on additional soundtracks, including, Within Our Gates and Body, Soul on Pioneers of African-American Cinema (Kino-2016) and the PBS documentary soundtrack – Birth of a Movement (2017). The film, Birth of a Movement was nominated for Outstanding Historical Documentary in 2018.
In addition, for work with Paul Miller, Reason was credited as an arranger for the PBS Documentary series: Reconstruction: America After the Civil War by Dr. Henry Louis Gates (2019).
Dana Reason currently lives in Oregon, USA, where she holds the position of Assistant Professor of Contemporary Music, School of Visual, Performing & Design Arts, at Oregon State University.
”Dana Reason can play…with chops and creativity that bring to mind Jacky Terrasson, John Medeski, Vijay Iyer, and Satoko Fujii, Dana is a formidable talent”
— Michael Gallant for Keyboard Magazine
Dana Reason 