Amelia Maciszewski

My mission is to raise awareness and understanding about the Indian subcontinent music and culture.

About Amie

Amie Maciszewski is a sitarist, scholar, and Hindustani music educator who seeks to create and inhabit spaces where the performing and visual arts, knowledge, and human rights weave together as narrative threads of the same story. She initially trained at Santiniketan, India, in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, under the late Prof. Suresh Misra, where she earned B.Mus.and M.Mus. degrees. Disciple of Grammy Award nominee sarode maestro Aashish Khan and Hindustani vocal diva Padmabhushan Girija Devi since the early 1990s, Amie has performed throughout North America, in India, Europe, and Japan, and has taught in North America since 1986. She has received numerous awards and grants for her scholarship and education/outreach through performance, ensemble directing, and documentary filmmaking. She earned the Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at University of Texas at Austin and has taught both applied music and academic courses on the faculties of the Universities of Texas, Alberta (where she served as Director of the Indian Music Ensemble in 2006, as well as of the community fusion ensemble Naad-Avaz in 2001-02), and Pittsburgh. In 2005, she performed to enthusiastic audiences at several venues in Kolkata, India, among them the prestigious Sangeet Research Academy. Several of her articles documenting her research with women musicians and socially marginalized musicians in India have been published in journals and books.

A resident of Austin, Texas, since 1993, she has been active in the Austin music scene as solo performer, ensemble leader and member, instructor, and workshop facilitator. A Cultural Contractor with the City of Austin Cultural Arts Program since 2000, she has received support for projects bringing together local artists with Indian music and dance maestros for workshops and collaborative performances. She arranged and recorded the soundtrack for Cenozoic Studios’ critically acclaimed “Naan Wayne & Masala” trailers shown at the 2003 South X Southwest Film Festival. As a member of the world music ensemble The Gypsies, she co-composed the soundtrack for Tod Browning’s 1924 silent drama “The Unknown,” which the group performed live in 1999 at the historic Alamo Drafthouse Theater. Her Sangeet Millennium Ensemble, founded in 2006 in Austin, is a collective of Indian, jazz, and other world musicians who together create New World Music.

In addition to music scholarship and performance, Amie sees ethnographic filmmaking as an important aspect of her mission to re-present the music and culture she studies, makes, and lives in an accessible manner. Her first film, Our Stories, Our Songs: North Indian Women’s Musical Autobiographies, premiered on Austin Community Access Channel on International Women’s Day 2000 and has screened at numerous venues in the US, Canada, and India. In 2004, she produced Guria, Gossip, and Globalization (GGG), a point-of-view documentary that provides a glimpse of present-day courtesan musicians in several locations in North India. GGG premiered at the 2004 Dallas South Asian Film Festival and received their Special Jury Award. That year, Amie took GGG and her sitar performance on tour in the US northeast and southwest to benefit the musicians in the film. Her and ms. mars’ documentary short, Chandni’s Choice (2006), a look at the life of a teenager in a musical matrilineage in North India, screened at the 2007 Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival in New York. Amie’s and ms. mars’ work-in-progress documentary short, Stages and Seduction, looks at North Indian courtesans performing in different contexts, or “stages,” the urban and semirural courtesans’ salons and the festival stage sponsored by the grassroots Indian nonprofit organization Guria.