The Silence is Hazy
I’m not one for endings, and even though my days as a latch-key child have come and gone, I now live dedicated to healing the children in us all. I speak for the unspoken and seek wonder in the mundane. I believe the moments between performance and “real-life” are fleeting, vagrant, and almost non-existent. And, if everything we do is art, as I do sincerely believe, then so in turn our lives must be art – and the silence between each moment, every masterpiece, hazy.
In this worldview, we grow like gardens where the evidence of our construction never truly dies. We carry everything with us, our abundance shaping who we are. We learn, relate, and change by interacting with those around us and the lives they’ve cultivated. Borders between community, collaboration, and communication become unclear, gardens overlap, and silence bleeds into reality.
Our Life is Art – and the Silence is Hazy
That is what it means to thrive.
Bio
Josíah Garza, or simply, Siah, is a multimedia artist hailing from the Mexican American border of South Texas. As a storyteller, his work aims to spark communication and collaboration within communities, and his primary medium of creation is music composition. He became a musician through the study of percussion and now performs as a narrator, recorder player, bajísta, vocalist, and conductor. Textiles, creative writing, electronics, and painting are among the other crafts he uses to expand this musical environment of emotionally informed performance practice.
As a witness to society, Siah hopes to capture our world’s shared history and draw understanding from the hazy moments between our lives. He was raised in the arts, and his experience studying contemporary dance and performing as a principal dancer for a Mexican ballet folklorico troupe evolved his practice into a dialogue across artistic mediums. He blurs the borders between his work and day-to-day life as composition, texture, and gradient inform everything he is and does. Narrative driven themes bridge his work into the realm of multidisciplinary practice – whether through opera, living-art-installations, or spoken-word performance, Siah's art is an extension of the stories he seeks to tell.
Siah is currently set to premiere a libretto workshop reading with Teatro Sin Fronteras in the Spring of 2026 under the direction of librettist, Demian Chavez Galvan for their next opera, Último Cuento. He has also begun a collaboration with percussionists of the Curtis Institute of Music for his living-art-installation, Brick by Brick, funded in part by a University of Texas Fine Arts Diversity Council Grant (FADC), and will be establishing a contemporary ballet residency in Philadelphia under the arts collective he directs, Wieldflower Arts. Siah is currently a Pathways Fellow within the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University set to earn both an MM and a DMA in Music Composition under the direction of Sky Macklay. Siah earned a BA from the Butler School of Music and a BSA in Biology from the University of Texas at Austin. Siah’s primary mentors in the arts have been the advocates, Yevgeniy Sharlat, Douglas Kinney Frost, Alyssa Weinberg, Michael Mikulka, Russell Podgorsek, Melissa Dunphy, Januibe Tejera, Missy Mazzoli, Rebeca Perez, Coty Maldonado, The “Pat” Garza, Julian Garza, and Celinda Hernandez.
Recent Work
Siah has recently premiered a commission from the Sarah and Ernest Butler Opera Center for his one-act opera, MARIA, with the librettist Demian Chavez Galvan. Based on the life of his grandmother, this work is an effort towards healing the generational traumas of racism, domestic violence, and substance abuse. He has written for and performed alongside The Rhythm Method String Quartet as a narrator during the Lake George Music Festival in a multidisciplinary work titled Bed of Flowers. In this premiere, Siah upcycled quilted fabrics into a custom garment he wore after passing out a hundred custom watercolor collage handouts of the poetry he wrote for the composition. Other recent collaborations include a premiere for Sandbox Percussion, three commissions for UT Landmarks’ Sound in Sculpture series, and his role as Peter Shickele, narrating in PDQ Bach’s Beethoven Symphony No. 5 with the UT Lab Orchestra.
Siah has been named a Minnie Stevens Piper Scholar, a Texas Association of Academic School Principals (TASSP) All-State Academic Team Member, and a College Board Foundation National AP Scholar. He is the first valedictorian of the South Texas Region education system to earn one of twelve annually designated memberships of TASSP, and has since been named an Undergraduate Presser Musical Foundation Scholar for his contributions to the Butler School of Music and the greater artistic scene of Texas. Siah has as well advanced the realm of botanical and chemical informatic research through a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates position with the University of California, Riverside Center for Plant Cell Biology (CEPCEB-REU). Siah’s opera, MARIA, earned the 2024 University of Texas Co-op George H. Mitchell Grand Prize for expanding the realm of academic excellence after he became one of the youngest composers in American history to premiere a fully-staged, evening-length opera at the age of 22.
Siah’s hobbies include gardening, writing letters, dismantling borders, talking to his Nana, and stopping microwaves at 0:01.
Our Life is Art – and the Silence is Hazy