Maya Giles
Maya Giles is a violinist who enjoys performing classical literature from all over the world. To her, the classics range from Mozart and William Grant Still to Radiohead and Stevie Wonder and everything in between, no matter its birthplace. Though she also plays viola, piano, turntables and numerous electronic digital instruments, the violin holds her musical voice.
When she isn’t performing on her violin, Maya Giles enjoys writing words and music and studying music technology and ethnomusicology. An avid artist-scholar, she believes that together these two fields will liberate the white supremacy chains on Euro-classical music, a genre that introduced her love of music. Giles hopes to continue her studies to become a “technomusicologist”, a term coined by the first technomusicologist Dr. Wayne Marshall, and use the two fields to disrupt genre boundaries that music is held in.
Photography by Ui-Seng François
Who I Am/Who’s AYAM
Maya is a transdisciplinary artist-scholar from the D.C. Metropolitan Maryland area. When she isn’t in school, she splits her time between freelancing and developing her artist project AYAM.
AYAM is the artist project of Maya and it contains all of her musical identities: Maya Giles, Maya Simone, Maya X, and Maestra Chameleon. Long pulled between her love of Euro-classical music and contemporary music, Maya hopes that her musical expression will create a meet in the middle space for the two worlds to coexist and cross pollinate both respective listening audiences.