Mark Enslin, Ph.D.
Mark Enslin studied composition and orchestration with Bob Chamberlin at Webster College (now Webster University) in St. Louis, and worked on several performance projects with John Zorn. Mark received his bachelors, masters and doctoral degree in music composition with a minor in bassoon performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying primarily with Herbert Brün.
In the summer of 1980 Enslin was invited to work with the composition students of Paulo Lima at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. He is a founding member of the Performer's Workshop Ensemble and the School for Designing a Society. His compositions — sometimes in made-up media, and mostly for small groups of performers — construct an imaginary puppet stage on which sentimentality, concern and impishness convert to unravel hierarchies. As an actor he has played lead roles in Brecht's Puntilla, Pirandello's The Vice, Bauro's Maledetto. Mark includes in his repertory an experimental solo music theater by Pamela and Wolf Rosenberg based loosely on the myth of Davy Crockett. Poems and commentary by Mark Enslin have been published in ALLOS and Perspectives of New Music. He is co-author with Susan Parenti of a chapter in Sounding Off: Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution. He is also co-author with Rick Burkhardt, William Billespie, and Joe Fetrelle, of a one-act play called Theater Therapy.
