Mark Brennan Doerries, conductor, composer, auteur and performance artist, founded the Luminescence Project in 2004, an ensemble dedicated to the composition and performance of multi-sensory music. The Luminescence Project recently performed in the Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival, at the Indiana University Art Museum, and the Bloomington Arts Festival. Additional installations and compositions have been mounted in New York City, Vancouver, Kansas City, and at the Taubman Museum in Roanoake, VA.

Recent original productions include staged performances of PASSIONATE CONVICTIONS, an electrified rock oratorio based on JS Bach's St. John Passion, and a liturgical drama Songs of Searching. Doerries recently traveled to São Paulo, Brazil with a multi-media production of Carmina Burana and just returned from performing with Venezuela's Simon Bolivar Orchestra in the 2010 Latin American Music Festival of Caracas under the direction of Carmen Helena Téllez.

Doerries served as assistant conductor and chorusmaster to Indiana University Opera Theater and Ballet preparing choruses for Constantine Kitsopoulos, Mark Gibson, Dan Riddle,  and Jeffery Cook including Die Fledermaus,Die Zauberflöte, The Light in the Piazza, and The Nutcracker.  As intern conductor of the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia Doerries prepared choruses for Alan Harler including La Rondine and Turandot. 

Active as an invited speaker, Doerries presented at the Modern Language Association's 2009 conference in Philadelphia on William Grant Still's And They Lynched Him On A Tree and civil rights in the 1940s deep-south.  Additional lectures and workshops include appearences at Festival 500 Choral Conference in Newfoundland, CA, the Hawaii International Conference on the Humanities, and at the Conference on the Music of William Grant Still in Natchez, MS.



Doerries is the Director of Choral Music at Olney Central College in Olney, IL and is completing a doctorate in conducting at Indiana University. He holds a masters degree from Temple University in Philadelphia, additional graduate work in music theory from Queen’s College, City University of New York, and degrees in music and biology from The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA.  

In addition to musical pursuits, Doerries’ research on chemosynthetic deep-sea ecosystems is published in the journals Deep-Sea Research and Marine Ecology.  Doerries collaborated on a discovery expedition to the uncharted ecosystem of the Blake Ridge Methane Seep 300 miles off the coast of South Carolina, diving 2100 meters below the ocean’s surface in the deep-submergence vehicle ALVIN.  An avid sailor, Doerries crewed aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer, a double masted brigantine tall sailing vessel, sailing from Woods Hole, MA to Bermuda conducting research on migration paths of eastern Atlantic eel populations documenting factors catalyzing their rapid population decline.