Short bio

Sugar Vendil (she/they) is a composer, pianist, and interdisciplinary artist who is forging new creative pathways as a second generation Filipinx American and future ancestor. She started her artistic life as a classical pianist, and after spending nearly a decade searching for her own voice, her practice evolved into making music and performances that integrate sound, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano. She has a keyboard/synth duo, Vanity Project, with composer Trevor Gureckis. Vendil is based in Lenapehoking, known as Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner and toddler, who she hopes will pursue dance and volleyball but will not force him/them.

Vendil’s work germinates from a kinesthetic and improvisatory approach rooted in lived experiences. Her sense of physicality and artistic autonomy is evident in her work, whether it is music, performance, or visual scores.

Vendil was awarded a 2022 NPN Creation Fund grant and 2021 MAP Fund grant to support Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia, which is being co-commissioned by Living Arts Tulsa, High Concept Labs, and National Sawdust. Antonym is a finalist for NEFA’s NTP Creation and Touring Fund.

Commissions include music for 3.1 Phillip Lim’s F/W 2024 show, Simple Tasks 2 on Jennifer Koh’s Grammy-award winning album Alone Together; a Chamber Music America commission to write for The Nouveau Classical Project; ETHEL’s Homebaked 2019, and ACF | Create. She scored films by Jih-E Peng’s May We Know Our Own Strength (2021) and GATHER (2023), both art films centered on works by visual artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, and The Rite of Spring (2024), written and directed by Nick Nocera. In early 2024, her visual scores were part of the National Arts Club’s 2020 Fellows group exhibition, Light, Line, and Sound. She showed two ink-on-paper scores, and trapunto etude (2024), a beaded and embroidered canvas score inspired by the art of Pacita Abad.

Vendil loves dancing and collaborating with other makers. She is part of choreographer Emily Johnson/CATALYST’s Being Future Being and was a musical collaborator with treya lam for Marie Lloyd Paspe and Almasphere’s bumalik. Vendil composed the music for Phil Chan’s Ballet des Porcelaines in 2021, and premiered composer-saxophonist Darius Jones’ LawNOrder at The Stone and Being Caged in ICE at Roulette in 2018. This year, she is dancing in Adrienne Westwood’s [ ]. Her album, May We Know Our Own Strength, is out on Gold Bolus Recordings.

Vendil is an advocate of the oxford comma, is obsessed with her (late) cat Coco, and has an excellent memory.

Auto-bio, or how I got over my fear of composing

Long bio (will update soon…above bio is current!)

Sugar Vendil is a composer, pianist, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking, known as Brooklyn. She started her artistic life as a classical pianist, and after spending nearly a decade searching for her own voice, her practice evolved into writing her own music and making performances that integrate sound, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano. She writes and performs her own solo music for piano and electronics and has a keyboard/synth duo, Vanity Project, with composer Trevor Gureckis. Vendil is a proud second generation Filipinx American.

Vendil most enjoys writing music for herself and artistic collaborators. Vendil has worked closely with a variety of artists, including artist Cynthia Alberto, violinist Natalie Calma, flutist Laura Cocks, pianist Melinda Faylor, violinist Hajnal Pivnick, and others. She writes and performs her own solo music for piano and electronics and has a keyboard/synth duo, Vanity Project, with composer Trevor Gureckis.

This year, Vendil was awarded a MAPFund grant to support her performance memoir, Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia. Commissions include Chamber Music America to write a new work for The Nouveau Classical Project; ETHEL’s Homebaked 2019 for Unsacred Geometry, and an ACF | Create commission. In 2018 her work Islander was selected for Dixon Place’s work in progress performance series. Past works include music for calligrapher Aoi Yamaguchi and visual artist Luma Jasim.  

In 2019 she was an Artist in Residence at High Concept Labs in Chicago and Target Margin Theater, and a Resident Artist at Mabou Mines, an artist-driven experimental theater collective founded in 1970 by Lee Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech (1939-2013), Fred Neumann (1926-2012), and David Warrilow.

Vendil’s Test Sites is a series of performance pieces that are experiments in process. Each Test Site involves a short-term process and are exercises in limits and creativity. While in residence at Target Margin, Vendil created Test Site 4: Now, Then, and then with her collaborator Jing Yu. Vendil created an additional Test Site, titled Test Site 5: Seedlings at Marble House Project in July 2019, which included an unplanned 30-foot drawing along with music for voice and electronics. She performed the first Test Site, created in collaboration with choreographer Coco Karol, at Periapsis Music and Dance’s Open Series in 2016. Later that year, she made a music video, Test Site 2: Sounds Within Sculptures, in collaboration with composer Trevor Gureckis and violinist Hajnal Pivnick. The work incorporated gongs from the Museum of Art and Design’s Harry Bertoia exhibition, Atmosphere for Enjoyment.  

Vendil loves dancing and collaborating with other makers. In September 2020, she danced in choreographer Emily Johnson/CATALYST’s The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better – Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s), an activation of Jeffrey Gibson’s sculpture, Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House at Socrates Sculpture Park. She is part of Johnson’s Being Future Being, which showed at Bates Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow in July 2021, and will premiere at The Broad Stage in 2022. She composed the music for Phil Chan’s Ballet des Porcelaines in 2021, and took part in premiering composer-saxophonist Darius Jones’ LawNOrder at The Stone and Being Caged in ICE at Roulette in 2018.

Vendil has performed and had her work featured at a variety of venues, ranging from arts spaces such as BAM Fisher, Dixon Place, Knockdown Center’s Ready Room, MoMa PS1, National Sawdust, the New School’s Glassbox Theater, The Stone, and Roulette; to galleries and studios such as The Development Gallery, Milk Studios, and Spring Studios. 

She will be in residence at JACK in Brooklyn in August and Crosstown Arts in Memphis, TN in 2022. Previous residencies include Yaddo, Marble House Project, Summer Labs at National Sawdust, Avaloch Farm, Earthdance (E|MERGE Multidisciplinary Residency), Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West, and Arts Letters & Numbers.  

Vendil is a recipient of Puffin Foundation and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement grants. Her time as Fellow in the Target Margin Institute for Collaborative Theater Making in 2016 encouraged her to further pursue composition and performance making.