September 28, 2025 // Nichols Arboretum
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Hosted and Sponsored by Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum
We are honored to collaborate once again with Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum to host Refugia Festival's second season in Ann Arbor!
Refugia Festival 2025 is a pay-as-you-can event, with free being the lowest admission cost (suggested ticket prices: $10/students [K-12 + college], $20/general admission). The event is family-friendly and welcome to all!
Interested in volunteering at Refugia Festival? Sign up here!
Please visit our "Get Involved at RF25" page for more info on engagement opportunities, including submitting your nature-inspired art to the Field Resonances art gallery.
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Refugia Festival 2025 Artists
Stephanie Vasko
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PC: Vasko (CC-BY-NC-DC license)
Stephanie E. Vasko is a performance artist who creates works with sound, electronics, sculpture, coding/software, video, and photography. Often taking inspiration from nature and natural phenomena, she combines field recordings, synths, software, and gestural interfaces to perform works that invite audience participation. She has performed at a variety of festivals across the United States. She is the co-founder of both the Ambient Annotations experimental music series and the Reverberator experimental music festival in Lansing, MI.
Program:
“From Dawn till Dusk//Dances and Duels”
This interactive performance will take audience members on a journey through Michigan’s natural spaces from dawn to dusk. Using a mixture of prompts and visualizations, perspective taking, field recordings, virtual synthesis, electromagnetic field listening, microphones and sensors, and audience participation, this performance will highlight the sonic dances and duels between humans and the environment. Audience participation is highly encouraged.
Yvonne Pruneau
Yvonne Pruneau is a composer, pianist, and improviser based in Detroit MI. She received a BA in piano performance as well as an MMus in composition/theory from Wayne State University. Her music explores conjunctions of emotional resonance within calculated and harrowing constructs through fixed media, sampling, synthesizers, field recordings, performance art, and electro-acoustic invention. She is fascinated by systems of information and circular ecosystems of culture, how they form, and how they will unravel. Yvonne’s art and sound-world traverse themes of extrarealism, dystopia, nature, technology, sense experience, and transsexualism.
FLYDLPHN
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Based in Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti, FLYDLPHN is a mixed chamber ensemble that advocates for composers by empowering collaborative unrestrictive play. FLYDLPHN cultivates a distinctive panoramic soundscape making extensive use of electro-acoustic, multimedia, and improvised performance. We desire to build a community that empowers the sharing of art from early-career composers and underrepresented voices, and we do so with our various productions in compelling spaces throughout the year. Ultimately we are a collective of friends who are excited to create together. When given one chance to breach the surface of the cosmic soup, we are grateful to be the dolphin in midair showing our best trick to the world. FLYDLPHN is flutist Lexi Eubanks, clarinetist Oliver Bishop, bassoonist Bryce Richardson, bassist Emani Barber, and percussionists Olivia Cirisan and Ancel Fitzgerald Neeley.
White Flowers
PC (clockwise from top left):
Marisa Klug-Morataya
Marisa Klug-Morataya
Marisa Klug Morataya
Sarah Uddin
White Flowers is a string ensemble that came out of Autophysiopsychic Millennium’s theatrical performance Something Else in the Garden, based on Dr. Yusef Lateef’s novella, Night in the Garden of Love.
Autophysiopsychic Millennium (APPM) is a Black-led creative research and performance collective that explores, experiment, and studies the music philosophy and spiritual works of world-renowned multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, author, visual artist, professor, Afro-Futurist, and Detroit native, Dr. Yusef Lateef.
White Flowers integrates musical compositions based on environmental themes and climate consciousness to initiate a cultural discourse around climate change and the importance of addressing it before it’s irreversible. These are themes discussed in Dr. Lateef’s Night in the Garden of Love, which is set on a dying Earth due to human destruction and corruption. These compositions will engage deep human emotions to connect with climate change issues through a social, political, and cultural lens. They will serve as a platform to highlight the gravity of the climate emergency.
The Regenerate! Orchestra
The Regenerate! Orchestra is a radical experiment in inclusive music-making. It seeks to reimagine the institution of the symphony orchestra with human connection, play, and community at its center. It makes music from a queer, nature-centric perspective. Each event brings together several dozen community soundmakers from across Southeast Michigan to make ambient, site-specific soundscapes and to commune with other area creatives.
Want to play with Regenerate! at Refugia Festival? Sign up to perform here!
Refugia Festival 2025 Educators
Bill Rapai
Bill Rapai is executive director of the Kirtland’s Warbler Alliance and a member of the Kirtland’s Warbler Conservation Team. The Alliance’s mission is to facilitate connections between people, the jack pine ecosystem, and the Kirtland’s Warbler to ensure the long-term conservation of the rarest migratory songbird in North America. Among his responsibilities is identifying, training and deploying volunteers to help with a census that monitors the health of the population by counting birds by listening for their song.
He is a former newspaper editor (Detroit Free Press and The Boston Globe) and the author of three books, including The Kirtland’s Warbler: The story of a bird’s fight against extinction and the people who saved it, published by University of Michigan Press.
David Clipner
David Clipner is the lead faculty member for the Music Production & Audio Engineering program at Washtenaw Community College in the Digital Media Arts Department. He also serves as Director of Education & Wildlife at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum and Leslie Science & Nature Center, where he oversees programming and live animal training and welfare. Through his family’s business, Copper Bear Shire, he and his wife teach homesteading skills and provide services such as native habitat landscaping, doula/birth work, and audio production/recording. One way he looks to make connections between his multiple interests is with his artistic and research-based projects, where he focuses on merging applied behavior analysis and conservation psychology with multimedia performance and exhibition to create thought-provoking experiences that inspire positive behavioral changes.
Hailey Becker
Hailey Becker is an intermedia artist and researcher who blends installation art and scientific research to better understand how humans process ecological loss. Her work is highly collaborative, and she enjoys bringing seemingly unrelated people together through her projects. Becker is an MFA student in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Lab in the Department of Forestry at Michigan State University.
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Nichols Arboretum
"Stage in the Arb"
Amphitheater
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
We recommend the 1610 Washington Heights (peony garden/Reader Center) entrance to access the space. Please note that the routes to the Stage are unpaved gravel paths and include slopes, staircases, grass, and gravel as part of the terrain.
Accessibility Note
Due to an ongoing construction project, the M-29 Parking Lot (Nichols Drive entrance), which is typically our ADA-accessible lot, is closed. Transportation by golf cart is available on the day of Refugia Festival from the 1610 Washington Heights entrance, but please contact Alexis Ford at forda@umich.edu or at
734-819-0266 in advance to schedule your golf cart transportation or to have any other accessibility questions answered.
ADA-compliant toilets are available at the Arb Visitor Center, and port-a-johns (including one that is ADA-compliant) are available at the river landing, closest to Refugia Festival.
Shuttles Available Between Nichols Arboretum, CCTC, and Matthaei Botanical Gardens!
Want to make your transportation easier to attend Refugia Festival? A charter bus will be shuttling folks on a continuous loop every ~15 minutes from the Arb (Reader Center entrance, 1610 Washington Heights) to CCTC (428 Church St) to Matthaei Botanical Gardens/Campus Farm (1800 Dixboro Rd) and back. Shuttles will run from noon through 4:30 pm.
