Stanzi Vaubel, PhD Media Study ‘20
Stanzi Vaubel, PhD Media Study ‘20
Founder/Director, Indeterminancy Festival and Indeterminancy Consulting Group
Film & Media Faculty, New York Arts Program
Stanzi Vaubel began her training as a classical cellist at The Juilliard Pre-College. She received her BA from Northwestern University and her PhD from The University at Buffalo in the Media Study Department while on teaching fellowship. She received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2019, allowing her to bring The Indeterminacy Method to Canada. She has collaborated on projects at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center, and has performed at such venues such as Tanglewood, The Long House, and Carnegie Hall. She has worked as a producer for New York Public Radio and produced a series entitled "The Gift" for Chicago Public Radio. Her audio documentaries have been featured on WBEZ, BBC, and spotlighted by The Third Coast Audio Festival. Her work has been commissioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Burchfield Penney Arts Center, KANEKO, UnionDocs, Public Space One, and Free City Festival. During her time in Buffalo she became interested in site-specific productions, creating SITES DO THINGS TO PEOPLE (2015) staged at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, EXCURSIONS INTO UNKNOWABLE WORLDS (2016) staged at the Hi-Temp Warehouse.
In 2016 she founded The Indeterminacy Festival focused on creating large-scale collaborative events which involved over a hundred participants and united a wide variety of disciplines and communities around solving complex problems. The festival was staged at Silo City for two years, UNCERTAINTY (2017), EMERGENCE (2018), and PASTFUTURE/FUTUREPAST at The Penn Dixie Fossil Park and Nature Reserve in 2019. In 2020 while on Fulbright, she staged a performance in partnership with suoni per il popolo at Sala Rossa in Montreal, entitled CREATING AN OPEN SYSTEM, hosted in collaboration with conductor Guillaume Bourgogne and his improvisation students at McGill University's Schulich School of Music. Previous festivals have been supported by New York State Council for the Arts, Mark Diamond Research Fund, the Physics and Media Study Departments at UB, Techne Institute, The Fulbright Foundation, and the College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship.
In Fall 2020, Stanzi launched The Indeterminacy Consulting Group (ICG) in development with McGill University's Building 21 and The Fulbright Foundation. At Building 21 she serves as an academic mentor. In this role, she trains students how to thrive within uncertainty, bringing The Indeterminacy Method to coach students how to improvise new solutions to complex problems.