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Bernard Gordillo, photographer

Mark Brennan Doerries is an advocate of multi-sensory music and performance.  In 2004 Doerries founded the Luminescence Project, an ensemble dedicated to the performance, composition, and research of multi-sensory music.  The Luminescence Project recently performed in the Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival, at the Indiana University Art Museum, and as part of the 2008 Bloomington Arts Festival. 

Doerries serves as an assistant conductor and chorus master to Indiana University's Opera Theater and Ballet preparing choruses for Mark Gibson, Dan Riddle,  and Jeffery Cook including Mozart's Die Zauberflöte and Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker.  As Intern Conductor of the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia Doerries prepared choruses for Alan Harler including Puccini's La Rondine and Turandot. 

Doerries’ upcoming productions include a staged performance of J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion, PASSIONATE CONVICTIONS with electrified instruments and his own liturgical drama Songs of Searching.  This past August Doerries traveled to Sao Paulo, Brazil with a multi-media production of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil chorus and orchestra.

In addition to performing, Doerries is active as an invited speaker and recently 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.  Doerries has also spoken at the Festival 500 Choral Conference in Newfoundland, CA, the 2009 Hawaii International Conference on the Humanities  Annual Conference, and at the Conference on the Music of William Grant Still in Natchez, MS.

Doerries is completing a doctorate in conducting at Indiana University and 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.  Mark also studied conducting and German in Freiburg, Germany and at Bard College, NY.

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 previously uncharted ecosystem of the Blake Ridge Methane Seep 300 miles off the coast of South Carolina, diving over 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.

"Doerries had the ensemble singing to every dramatic point."

-- Peter Jacobi, Herald Times - Bloomington, IN 13 April 2010