The Kulas Foundation Theatre Composer Initiative is a three month fellowship program providing emerging, early-career composers with first-hand experience creating music for theatre.
This initiative engages composers in a collaborative process under the guidance of the show producer and director to compose and produce original music for at least one full production in CPT’s Season. Composers gain hands-on learning experiences and play an integral role in the creative process. The program is intended to significantly grow CPT’s capacity for developing original music and supports the growth of local artists.

Executive Artistic Director Raymond Bobgan is proud to announce Sam Fisher, Patrick Stoops, and Sean Hussey as the inaugural Kulas Composer Fellows.

SAM FISHER is a 22 year old senior in the Technology in Music and Related Arts department at Oberlin Conservatory. He grew up in Athens, GA in the heart of a vibrant music scene where he was able to study percussion, guitar, piano, and voice with prolific local musicians throughout his youth. He has been composing and producing music since he was very young and has not looked back since beginning this pursuit. In 2009 he went to Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music to study Electronic Media. After spending a year at CCM surveying the vast landscape of creative digital media, Sam decided to enter into intensive study as a composer of electronic music and transferred to Oberlin Conservatory’s Technology in Music and Related Arts program. At Oberlin he entered collaboration after collaboration in the pursuit of learning about all of the artistic mediums he could interact with using music. He discovered a special liking for scoring Theater and Dance. This eventually led to him to working two consecutive summers as the Composer and Sound Designer for the Oberlin Summer Theater Festival. In spring of 2012 he participated in the interdisciplinary OASIS program at Oberlin, which lead to the production of Water Ways at Cleveland Public Theater.

PATRICK STOOPS is a Cleveland-area composer and musician. Under the psuedonym p.stoops and with the band Kiss Fight, Patrick writes electronic music with heavy hip-hop influences. Patrick is enrolled in Cleveland State University for music composition, where he has written chamber pieces, scored independent films, and, most recently, won the 2013 CSU Jazz Composition competition. Patrick has composed music for numerous theatre works including Cleveland Public Theatre’s Pandemonium Inquietude (2012) and Blink (2013), 419: A Dramatization (2012), Tender Napalm (2013), pieces for the Gordon Square Arts District Day, and Cleveland State’s In the Red and Brown Water (2013). Outside of composing and performing, Patrick is a professional audio engineer and the resident music supervisor for the Cleveland-area theatre company Theatre Ninjas.

SEAN HUSSEY is currently studying at the Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music. His “haunting chants” (Cleveland Plain Dealer) and “emotionally involving (CoolCleveland) music has been played throughout the Midwest and primarily in the Cleveland area. Sean has won several awards including Best Solo Composition and Best Overall Composition in the 2010 Composition Competition presented by the Wisconsin State Music Association for his piano solo, “Introduction” from the ballet The Tale of Dmitri Ickutt. Sean’s composition Deluge was selected for presentation at the 2013 SEAMUS Conference. Sean has studied with, Dr. Clint Needham, Dr. Mandy Fang, Zhou Tian, David Gooding and Matt Turner. Being inspired by movement and dance, Sean is currently collaborating with Inlet Dance Theatre as a composer and dancer. Sean continues to search for new opportunities to create with different artists across any and all mediums.