Joseph Bohigian to become Artistic Director
JOSEPH BOHIGIAN TO BECOME ARTISTIC DIRECTOR IN JANUARY 2027
SAN FRANCISCO—July 30, 2026—Other Minds announces today that Joseph Bohigian, current Associate Director of Other Minds, will become its new Artistic Director in January of 2027. Having worked at, and worked-his-way-up at, Other Minds for over four years, Bohigian’s coming tenure as Artistic Director will combine the lively and historically grounded artistic imagination that marks his own compositional output with a foundation in the institutional practices that have made Other Minds such a success over the past 33 years.
During his four years at Other Minds, Bohigian repeatedly has demonstrated his commitment to the expansion and upkeep of the organization. In 2022, he started the Other Minds Podcast, now in its fifth season featuring 43 interviews and counting with composers, performers, authors, and more. He’s programmed over fifty episodes of Music from Other Minds, the weekly 2-hour radio program produced for KALW 91.7 Bay Area. He’s also already done much to enrich the programming at Other Minds by bringing composers Artur Avanesov, Bora Yoon, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Jan Martin Smørdal, and Kristine Tjøgersen to various Other Minds Festivals.
Charles Amirkhanian, the current Executive and Artistic Director of Other Minds who will transition to the role of Director Emeritus in January, says, “Part of whatever success I’ve achieved at Other Minds has been due to my previous work meeting and interviewing a wide variety of composers over my 23 years in radio. Joseph Bohigian has proven to be an indispensable member of the Other Minds brain trust, in part by following a similar path seeking out discussion and acquaintance with so many artists for our podcasts and radio programs. In just four years, he’s excelled at learning every aspect of our artistic and administrative work, and his deep knowledge of music and the many ways it’s now being made, coupled with his background in the American Experimental Tradition, give me confidence that Other Minds will continue to support the most deserving artists of our time.”
Bohigian has been tied to Other Minds for much longer than four years. He first met Amirkhanian in 2011 as an undergraduate student at Fresno State, Amirkhanian’s alma mater. Bohigian’s class was visited by Amirkhanian, who gave a lecture on his music and his work at Other Minds, and on November 5, 2011, Bohigian was part of a performance of Amirkhanian’s Octet for Ratchets at the Fresno New Music Festival. He still uses the Other Minds bookmark given to him by Charles on that visit to Fresno 15 years ago. The two remained connected, and in 2015, Bohigian programmed Amirkhanian’s Dzarin Bess Ga Khorim at concerts of music by living Armenian composers in Fresno and Glendale, California in remembrance of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. As the ratchet turns, so does life; on January 19, 2025, Bohigian helped premiere Amirkhanian’s Noose Ratchet during an Other Minds event celebrating Amirkhanian’s 80th Birthday.
“Even as a young composer, Other Minds stands out as one of the biggest influences in my musical development,” says Bohigian. “I’m really looking forward to extending its tradition of gathering our time’s most inventive composers, established by Charles over the past few decades, and highlighting a new generation of exceptional artists.”
Most intriguing, perhaps, is Bohigian’s artistic success as part of Other Minds. In 2023, Other Minds released his debut CD The Water Has Found its Crack, a collection of work from 2018–2021 in which each piece—written for different ensembles, from laptop ensemble to string quartet—engages with a different aspect of the California-born composer’s position as a member of the Armenian diaspora. “The deeply expressive and thoughtful nature of Joseph Bohigian’s compositions has impressed me,” Amirkhanian notes. “While his music touches on ethnology, employing various languages and cultural symbols, he transforms these sources into a new expression employing recent technological innovations in parallel with our ancient models.”
This year’s Other Minds Festival 30 opens with the premiere of Bohigian’s I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment, an evening-length multimedia work about the life of the visionary Soviet-Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990) that combines the multilingual songs of the 18th century bard Sayat Nova in Armenian, Azeri, and Georgian with live electronic manipulation of recordings by South Caucasus folk musicians. A collaboration with vocalist and duduk player Khatchadour Khatchadourian, Ensemble Decipher, and artists Tara Baghdassarian and Karo Yagjian, the project has garnered support from the MAP Fund, Zellerbach Family Foundation, American Research Institute of the South Caucasus, Creative Armenia-AGBU, and New Music USA.
Joseph Bohigian is a composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music. His work focuses on issues of memory, cultural reunification, and diaspora. With a strong interest in reestablishing a relationship with lost elements of our past to better envision our future, he makes use of archival materials in his music, such as sound recordings, interviews, and written texts, synthesizing fragments of song lyrics and reviving ancient musical notations.
Bohigian’s music has been performed at the International Computer Music Conference (Limerick, Ireland), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), TENOR Conference (Melbourne), Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montreal), New Music Gathering, and Aram Khachaturian Museum Hall (Yerevan) by the Mivos Quartet, Decibel, Great Noise Ensemble, Argus Quartet, and Playground Ensemble. He has received grants and fellowships from New Music USA, the MAP Fund, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus and a CD of his music was released on Other Minds Records in 2023, described by The Wire as exercising “a powerful fascination.”
Much of Bohigian’s work around memory and diaspora is influenced by his Armenian heritage. He was raised in Fresno, California, a major hub of Armenian-American life since the late 19th century, and lived in Yerevan, Armenia from 2019–2020, where he studied composition with Artur Avanesov, conducted research at the Komitas Museum-Institute, and taught a laptop orchestra at the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan. His research of various musical styles from Armenia and the diaspora has resulted in sound installations for the Komitas Museum-Institute and Armenian Museum of Fresno, a collaboration with the Rerooted Archive creating a musical setting for its recorded testimonies of displaced Syrian-Armenians, and a forthcoming collaboration with Khatchadouor Khatchadourian creating an evening-length work about the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov with songs by the 18th century ashugh Sayat Nova.
Joseph performs as a founding member of Ensemble Decipher, a group dedicated to working with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies. He has recently performed with Decipher at the International Computer Music Conference, Roulette Intermedium, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Society of Electro-Acoustic Music Conference, and Network Music Festival. He has curated concerts of music by living Armenian composers with the Fresno State New Music Ensemble for the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide featured on NPR’s Here and Now and The California Report as well as for the Composer’s Voice Concert Series in New York, for which he was called a “triple-threat” by Time Out New York for his role as curator, composer, and performer. Bohigian also produces broadcasts of contemporary music for Music from Other Minds on KALW in San Francisco and interviews with composers on the Other Minds Podcast and the music/technology-focused series Decipher This!.
Bohigian holds a PhD and MA in composition from Stony Brook University, where he studied with Nirmali Fenn, Matthew Barnson, Margaret Schedel, Perry Goldstein, and Dan Weymouth, and a BA from California State University Fresno, studying with Kenneth Froelich and Benjamin Boone.
