Leadership Role: Frames Advisory Committee Member

Frames Advisory Committee Member

Kelly Garrison is director of the Da Camera Society which presents Chamber Music in Historic Sites. Called “undoubtedly the most imaginative, permanent floating concert series in Southern California, if not the nation,” (Applause Magazine), the program has been acclaimed as a model by local critics. “Amid all the local competition, the series that is simply the best – in venues, in consistent quality of performance, in the power to rejuvenate the listener as only live musical events can – is CHAMBER MUSIC IN HISTORIC SITES” (Los Angeles Times). With 21 to 29 concerts each year staged in relatively intimate settings, the Society is both the largest and the smallest presenter of chamber music in the Southland. Their historic-sites programs have included newly-discovered music of the California missions at Mission San Fernando, Marcus Roberts at the Dunbar (a focal point during Central Avenue’s golden age of jazz), music from the court of Louis XIV at a Pasadena “chateau,” a children’s concert of Japanese traditional music at the Aikido Center in Little Tokyo, the great Milt Jackson at Union Station, the Tallis Scholars in an English Gothic-styled church, and Poncho Sanchez at the Mayan Theater.

In addition to enriching the Southern California community with outstanding musical performances celebrating our cultural landmarks, the Society’s mission includes the goal of making a difference in the community by bringing music into the lives of those most in need of its enriching and affirmative powers – low-income and diverse audiences of young people, seniors, the disabled and the disadvantaged.

Board Secretary

Writer-director-producer Christopher Munch was born in Pasadena, CA and is a passionate student of the history of Los Angeles. Many of his films deal with a lost past — re-envisioning and re-interpreting people and places that only exist in memory. He brings to FORT: LA an enthusiasm for sharing what once made Los Angeles a great city, and what of that history can still be accessed to inspire the imaginations today.

Critic Graham Fuller summed up the work of Mr. Munch by stating that his films “meditate quietly on the perennial struggle people face in communicating with those they love, on mortality, on the role of memory in the mosaic of conscious¬ness, and the evanescence that drives his restless protagonists to grasp futilely, and often nobly, at impossible dreams.” Critic and cinema historian Jonathan Rosenbaum called him “one of America’s most gifted independent filmmakers.”

He is a past Guggenheim fellow, recipient of the Wolfgang Staudte Prize at Berlin, winner of two Independent Spirit Awards, including the “Someone To Watch” Award, and has been featured in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions. He has received competitive awards from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (for a science-themed screenplay about physicist Frank Oppenheimer), Creative Capital Foundation, The American Film Institute, The Merchant and Ivory Foundation, and others. Five of his features have played at the Sundance Film Festival.