DOR Staff Excellence Award: Nominate a team or individual

Jeffrey Morris

Professor
Department of Performance Studies
College of Liberal Arts

Jeffrey Morris creates experiences that engage audiences’ minds with their surroundings. His performances, installations, lectures, and writings appear in international venues known for cutting-edge arts and deep questions in the arts. He has won awards for making art emerge from unusual things: music tailored to architecture and cityscapes, performance art for the radio, serious concert music for toy piano and Sudoku, and electronic voice phenomena.

Morris will use his Arts & Humanities Fellowship, Two Debut Electroacoustic Jazz Albums Distributed through Naxos, for a culmination of a series of performances and recording sessions with international young innovators and a venerable award winner and will make them available on compact disc to bridge diverse audiences and attract more collaborators and commissions of even greater prestige, also allowing them to be cited by other authors.

In 2007, Morris received his doctorate in composition from the University of North Texas. He joined the Texas A&M faculty in 2005 and was promoted to associate professor in 2014.

To date, Morris has presented fifty-one compositions, installations, and unique performance environments and has published eighteen book chapters, journal articles, conference papers, or CD/DVD tracks. 

During 2016, Morris received first prize at the international competition Viseu Rural 2.0: Sonic Explorations of a Rural Archive from the Associação Cultural de Nodar in Portugal and second prize at Concours de Bourges in France. His other awards include a commission award at Environmental Art Biennale from the I-Park Foundation in Connecticut in 2015; placing as a semi-finalist for the American Prize in Chamber Music in 2015; third prize in the competition Music in Architecture | Architecture in Music at The University of Texas at Austin in 2011; third prize at UnCaged Toy Piano in New York City in 2008; and was declared the winner of Radio Killed the Video Star by the CUE Art Foundation in New York City in 2008.

His work has been reviewed by Sculpture Magazine and by World Architecture magazine, both in 2016. He recently was named editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Art, Culture and Design Technologies.