Ikue Mori arrived to New York in 1977 and subsequently became the drummer of the iconic No Wave band DNA. She later started incorporating drum machines in her music practice and moved on to using her computer as an instrument to blend sonic and visual space.

William Winant is a percussionist and educator who, during his 40+ year career, has collaborated with composers such as John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Barbara Monk Feldman, Wendy Reid, Frank Zappa, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Hi-Kyung Kim, James Tenney, Terry Riley, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Joan LaBarbara, Yo-Yo Ma, Lou Harrison, John Zorn, Bun-Ching Lam, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, and Wadada Leo Smith, several of whom have written pieces specifically for him. He has recorded and toured worldwide and teaches at Mills College and UC Santa Cruz.

Valentina Magaletti is a drummer, percussionist and composer whose practice has been characterized for its constant experimentation with new materials and sounds. In addition to her solo work, she is currently a member of Vanishing Twin and Tomaga, where she explores a wide range between conventional jazz drumming and experiments with field recordings and drone sounds.

NOMON is a percussion and electronic music duo composed of sisters Shayna and Nava Dunkelman. After spending years apart working on their own, Shayna and Nava came together in 2018 to form NOMON. Born and raised in Tokyo to an Indonesian mother and an American father, the sisters became multi-instrumentalists performing alongside their mother, a musician and composer active in Asia and the Middle East. NOMON's music is as visual as it is aural, and their performances have a physicality and an immersive choreographic quality, while the sounds combine electronic soundscapes and intricately composed percussion parts.

The Lab believes that if artists are given enough time, space, and funding to realize their vision, the work they produce will change the way we experience the world. These are often small propositions that (like all great art) challenge the familiar ways we perceive value, and so the lab seeks out extraordinary artists who are underrepresented as a result of gender, class, race, sexuality, or geography, and whose work is not easily defined and therefore monetized. As a site of constant iteration and indeterminacy, The Lab is, above all, a catalyst for artistic experimentation. The Lab is W.A.G.E. Certified. W.A.G.E. Certification is a program initiated and operated by working artists that publicly recognizes non-profit arts organizations demonstrating a commitment to voluntarily paying artist fees that meet a minimum standard.

What can we learn from artists today? CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is a nonprofit exhibition venue and research institute dedicated to reflecting on this question through temporary exhibitions, public events, and in-depth research. It is part of California College of the Arts in San Francisco. The Wattis centers the artist's perspective and supports artists who take risks and experiment with new ideas. We provide a public forum to established, emerging, and under-recognized artists who challenge our ways of understanding the art of our current moment. The Exhibition Program consists of new productions of commissioned work, as well as exhibitions of specific bodies of existing work by artists from around the world. The Research Program commits an entire year to a single artist's work and uses it as a lens to reflect on our contemporary moment more broadly via reading groups, public events, and publications.