The Artists
Darren Aronofsky
Postcard From Earth Now Live
Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Darren Aronofsky was born and raised in Brooklyn.
Most recently, he directed the A24 film “The Whale” starring Brendan Fraser, who won a Best Actor Academy Award® for his performance. MacArthur winning playwright Samuel D. Hunter adapted the screenplay from his critically acclaimed play.
Aronofsky wrote and directed 2017’s “mother!” starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Ed Harris. The New York Times hailed the film calling it a “master class.” Before that, Aronofsky made “Noah,” the 2014 biblical epic starring Russell Crowe, Anthony Hopkins, Jennifer Connelly, and Emma Watson. It was a box office hit and Aronofsky’s largest opening.
In 2010, Aronofsky received a Best Director Academy Award® nomination for the indie box office phenomenon “Black Swan” starring Natalie Portman, who won a Best Actress Academy Award® for her performance. 2008’s “The Wrestler” was touted as a “bravura work of art” by Entertainment Weekly and “a film of authentic beauty and commanding consequence” by the Wall Street Journal. The film won Golden Globes for actor Mickey Rourke and singer/songwriter Bruce Springsteen. Aronofsky won the Golden Lion for the best film at the Venice Film Festival. He was the third American director to win that award in the oldest film festival in the world. Previous to that were the acclaimed and award-winning films “The Fountain” (2006), “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), and “π” (1998).
As a producer under his Protozoa label, Aronofsky has been responsible for “Jackie” which garnered three Academy Awards, the documentary “Some Kind of Heaven'' which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, artist Prune Nourry’s docu-memoir “Serendipity” which made its world premiere at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, “Pacified” which won the Golden Shell top prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, “Catch the Fair One'' which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival where it won the Audience Award, and the documentary feature “The Territory” which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and won both the Audience Award and Special Jury Award for Craft in the World Cinema Documentary category as well as a Peabody in the Feature Documentary Film Category.
In 2021, he executive produced the six-part National Geographic docu-series, “Welcome to Earth” starring Will Smith as he explores some of the most intriguing and inaccessible corners of the planet. In 2018, Aronofsky executive produced both the Emmy-nominated National Geographic series “One Strange Rock” and the virtual reality experience “SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime.” The VR experience, featuring the voices of Jessica Chastain and Patti Smith, closed a record-breaking deal out of Sundance and won the Golden Lion.
In 2022, Aronofsky executive produced “The Good Nurse” starring Noah Emmerich, Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne, the six-part series “Limitless” starring Chris Hemsworth for National Geographic, “Black Gold” for Paramount+, and “Kindred,” an adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s influential novel, for FX.
Aronofsky is an ardent supporter of the environment and sits on the boards of The Sierra Club and The School for Field Studies. Aronofsky has received humanitarian awards from PETA and The Humane Society of the United States, which honored him with its inaugural Humane Filmmaker Award.
Phish
Coming April 2024
Phish – Trey Anastasio (guitar, vocals), Jon Fishman (drums, vocals), Mike Gordon (bass, vocals), and Page McConnell (keyboards, vocals) – has earned one of music’s most dedicated fan communities for its blend of idiosyncratic songcraft, extended improvisation, and immersive live performances, all fusing a variety of genres into their own freewheeling sound and vision.
Formed in 1983 in Burlington, VT, Phish has released 15 studio albums, beginning with 1989’s Junta and continuing through 2020’s Sigma Oasis, released on the band’s own JEMP Records. In 2002, the band launched LivePhish, which offers high-quality soundboard recordings of every show, regular releases from Phish’s substantial archive, and 4k live webcasts. LivePhish+, the band’s streaming service, is the most succesful artist-driven service of its kind, offering unlimited on-demand access to the entire LivePhish catalog.
Widely recognized among live music’s most beloved and inventive artists, Phish has played over 2,000 shows since their formation, regularly selling out multiple nights at arenas across North America including such annual traditions as sold-out Labor Day weekend runs at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park soccer stadium outside of Denver, Halloween extravaganzas, and four-night New Year’s Eve celebrations at NYC’s world-famous Madison Square Garden. Following next month’s shows, Phish will have performed 83 sold-out shows at The Garden since their debut performance there in 1994. In 2017, Phish performed The Bakers’ Dozen, a 13-night concert series which saw the band play 237 unique songs, repeating none during the entire run. The 13 shows concluded with Phish being presented a banner commemorating the unprecedented series, which hangs in the Garden’s rafters alongside ones for Billy Joel and Harry Styles.
In 1996, Phish presented the first of 11 self-produced festivals. The Clifford Ball, held on the decommissioned Plattsburgh Air Force Base in upstate NY, influenced a new generation of American rock festivals including Coachella and Bonnaroo. Phish marked the turn of the millennium with a New Year’s Eve festival at Florida’s Big Cypress Indian Reservation, drawing a record-setting attendance of 80,000 people, playing an historic seven-hour set, culminating at dawn on New Year’s Day.
In 1997, Phish founded The WaterWheel Foundation to oversee the band’s various charitable activities, harnessing the kindness of the Phish fan community to create positive change. WaterWheel fulfills this mission by collecting donations for local nonprofit organizations in association with Phish tour dates via WaterWheel’s Touring Division. WaterWheel also supports non-profits based in Phish’s home state of Vermont, especially those focused on cleaning up the Lake Champlain watershed. WaterWheel chooses beneficiaries from a wide sphere of causes including those working to protect the environment, promote social justice, fight food insecurity, provide music education, register voters, and those that help women and children, the homeless and others in need. Thanks to the generosity of Phish fans, the past 25 years has seen WaterWheel donate over $9M to more than 500 non-profit organizations. For more information or to donate, please see www.waterwheelfoundation.org.
Refik Anadol
Turkish-American media artist and director
Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is the Director of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. Anadol’s work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol offers us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expands the possibilities of interdisciplinary arts. Anadol’s site-specific data paintings and sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, collective experiences, public art, decentralized networks, and the creative potential of artificial intelligence. Anadol’s work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Art Basel, National Gallery of Victoria, Venice Architecture Biennale, Hammer Museum, Arken Museum, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Ars Electronica, Istanbul Modern, and ZKM | Center for Art and New Media.
U2
Live at Sphere
Acknowledged as the best live act in the world, U2 have consistently pushed the boundaries of live performance, with ground-breaking stage shows that embrace the latest in technology and innovation.
Achtung Baby, produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, was their seventh album and released in 1991. The album debuted at number one in the US Billboard 200 Top Albums and won a Grammy in 1993 for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. It went on to sell over 18 million copies worldwide. We can’t wait to see them perform at Sphere.