Edward Bilous
Edward Bilous is a composer, director, interdisciplinary artist, and educator whose work integrates diverse artistic disciplines with emerging technologies. Throughout his career, he has approached artistic practice as a form of inquiry, inspiring new forms of artistic expression and new ways of understanding the world. As an educator and institution builder, he has created programs, festivals, and international collaborations that advance interdisciplinary practice across the arts, education, and technology.
Current Leadership
Bilous is the Founding Director of the Center for Creative Technology and the Future Stages Festival at the Juilliard School. Over the course of his tenure at Juilliard, he has founded and directed a series of innovative initiatives that have defined the institution’s engagement with emerging technologies and new artistic practice, including InterArts at Juilliard: A Program for Interdisciplinary Collaboration (1995); the Music Technology Center (1996); Beyond the Machine (2000), a festival of interdisciplinary and multimedia performances; the Center for Innovation in the Arts (2010); the Future Stages Festival (2024); and Art of the Score (2026), a program of international films with original music by Juilliard composers presented at Film at Lincoln Center. Art of the Score was named the #1 program for film composers in the world by the Hollywood Reporter.
Director and Artistic Director
As a director and artistic director, Bilous is known for creating large-scale multimedia productions that unite music, movement, visual media, and interactive technologies into immersive experiences. He has also been a pioneer of distributed and telematic performance, directing projects that connect performers and audiences across continents in real time.
Among his notable productions are Terry Riley’s In C, performed simultaneously by orchestras in Tianjin, China, and New York; Sum of the Parts, a multimedia work for electronic instruments and interactive dance video performed by the Juilliard Electric Ensemble; Cracked Orlando, a multimedia opera with avatars by Jonathan Dawe; Bridging the Time-Space Divide, a distributed performance with artists from the Accademia Stauffer in Cremona, Italy; and Winter Music by John Cage, performed by artists in New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo on interconnected Yamaha Disklaviers functioning as a single instrument spanning more than 7,000 miles.
Composer and Interdisciplinary Artist
Bilous is a composer and interdisciplinary artist whose work spans the concert stage, film, television, dance, theater, and multimedia performance. His multimedia music-theater production Basetrack Live was named one of The New York Times’ “Top Ten Theatrical Events of 2014.”
His film and television scores include Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, an Academy Award-nominated documentary; The Emperor of All Maladies, the PBS series executive produced by Ken Burns; Portraits of Grief — A Tribute to the Victims of the September 11th Tragedy for The New York Times Television; Sacred: A Global Documentary Film (PBS); and the television series Forgiveness and Frontier House.
His long collaboration with Pilobolus Dance Theater has produced five original works, including On the Nature of Things and Night of the Dark Moon. Other notable works include Lucid Dreams, written for the American Composers Orchestra, and Mission Eternity for Beyond the Machine.
Public Leadership
Bilous served as Artistic Director of the National World War I Centennial Commission, established by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama. In that role, he directed major commemorative events, including Visions of Peace, featuring President Jimmy Carter, and a national service at Washington National Cathedral.
He also serves on the Advisory Board of the United Nations Chamber Music Society, where he has produced One Love, a multimedia concert celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the United Nations, along with numerous international events linking artists and audiences around the world.
Bilous is a frequent speaker on arts education, integrative learning, creative intelligence, emerging art forms, and the arts in the age of AI.
Notable talks include PBS American Masters, UNESCO’s International Day of Education, TEDx, MIT Hacking Arts, Charlie Rose, Juilliard Presents: On Collaboration and Technology, and Juilliard Presents: Cracked Orlando.
In 2012, Bilous was awarded the William Schuman Scholars Chair by the Juilliard School in recognition of his contributions to arts education.
Arts Education
Bilous began his career in arts education as one of the original teaching artists at the newly created Lincoln Center Institute, now Lincoln Center Education. Together with philosopher Maxine Greene and colleagues in dance, theater, and the visual arts, he helped create the basic canon of aesthetic education practices that continue to inspire teachers and learners worldwide.
Bilous served on the National Endowment for the Arts panel for Learning in the Arts and was Senior Education Advisor in the creation of Ensemble Connect, a program of the Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall, and the Weill Music Institute. He has also taught composition and music theory at the Manhattan School of Music Precollege Division.
Today, Bilous’ work centers on advancing Creative Intelligence and interdisciplinary learning, exploring how artistic practice develops transferable ways of thinking that extend across disciplines and domains.
Music Production and Recording Industry
Bilous has worked extensively as a composer, arranger, producer, and recording artist in New York’s recording industry. He worked with leading classical, jazz, rock, and pop musicians, including The Who, Sinéad O’Connor, Spin Doctors, Alice Cooper, Dr. John, Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker, Lou Marini, and Lenny Pickett. He also composed and produced music for HBO, PBS, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, and numerous film and television productions, working in major recording studios in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Nashville.
Education
Bilous received a Bachelor of Music in Composition from the Manhattan School of Music and Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the Juilliard School. He studied composition with Charles Wuorinen, Elias Tanenbaum, Elliott Carter, and Vincent Persichetti, and also studied privately with Krzysztof Penderecki and was mentored by Roger Sessions.