The Puerto Rico Experiment

Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican composer and performer who writes music for voices, orchestras, ensembles, and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. At the intersection of classical and electronic music, she blends unusual instruments, and acoustic, electronic, and found sounds “to underscore the inventive sound world that she brings to her music…” (San Francisco Chronicle). Rooted in her experience as a Puerto Rican artist living in the diaspora, her work explores migration, memory, absence, and belonging. Recent and upcoming projects include a cello concerto commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Yo-Yo Ma and Gustavo Dudamel, and The Puerto Rico Experiment, a song cycle for Roomful of Teeth and Balún commissioned by PAC NYC that examines Puerto Rico’s history as a site of political, scientific, and economic experimentation. Her music has been commissioned and performed by organizations and artists including Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, and Sō Percussion. She has also created multidisciplinary projects with drag performers, filmmakers, botanical artists, and comedians. Negrón was the first composer-in-residence at the New York Botanical Garden and has received honors including the Hermitage Greenfield Prize. Her screen credits include the HBO docuseries Menudo: Forever Young, the Netflix documentary Karol G: Tomorrow Was Beautiful, and Through Our Eyes for Sesame Workshop. Her arrangements can also be heard on Rosalía’s acclaimed 2025 album LUX (Columbia Records). A founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún, she lives in Brooklyn, where she looks for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work.

Brooklyn-based electronic indie band Balún identify as transnational. The quartet that broke out of the San Juan indie scene a decade ago has undergone a formational odyssey through the industry, academia and the stateside Puerto Rican experience. Balún’s long-awaited sophomore album Prisma Tropical focuses a vast field of genres and influences into a revelatory sound that evokes both the band’s homes and the distance between them. Heavy doses of tiple, bomba barrel drum, and dembow work alongside loops and layers of shimmering synths to accomplish something explicitly of the island, yet fluent in the language of global pop. Tied together around the magical realism of singer and composer Angélica Negrón’s lyrics, Balún’s deep understanding of reggaeton’s Jamaican dancehall roots has transformed their shoegaze pop into “dreambow.” Prisma Tropical was one of NPR’s Top 50 Albums of 2018, placed #4 in Rolling Stone’s Top 10 Latin Albums of 2018, and The New York Times named the single “Años Atrás” one of the “Best 65 Songs of 2018”.

Roomful of Teeth is a GRAMMY®-winning vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers, and community leaders from around the world, the group seeks to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music using a continuously expanding vocabulary of singing techniques. Roomful of Teeth has built a significant and ever-growing catalog of music through deep collaboration with a broad range of composers including Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, William Brittelle, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta, Paola Prestini, Nathalie Joachim, Caroline Shaw, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Clyne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Cava Menzies, Judd Greenstein, Terry Riley, Toby Twining, Ted Hearne, Eve Beglarian, Caleb Burhans, Ambrose Akinmusire, Michael Harrison, Peter S. Shin, and Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Recent appearances include performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, King’s Place in London, and the Barbican. The group has also moved into stage work with the visionary opera director Peter Sellars in Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus. Roomful of Teeth discography includes their eponymous first album, released in 2012, which was awarded a GRAMMY® Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and featured Roomful of Teeth member Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize winning piece “Partita for 8 Voices.”

Nicole Cecilia Delgado is a poet, translator and book artist. Her poetry has been widely published and translated on international literary platforms. She is the founder and co-director of La Impresora, a poetry press and Risograph studio dedicated to small-scale publishing and book arts. Delgado is regarded as one of the leading Puerto Rican poets of her generation and a cultural worker bringing together artists, activists and writers.

Ashley Pérez García is a writer and teacher. She has published two books of poetry: remolino (Riel, 2025), and La divisa (La Impresora, 2021). Her poetry and film criticism have been published in Revista Aullido, Periódico Claridad, 80grados, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. She is part of the organizing committee for the Puerto Rico International Poetry Festival and codirects its publishing project, Colección Playa Sucia. In 2022, Pérez García was named an inaugural Letras Boricuas fellow.

Mara Pastor is a Puerto Rican poet and essayist whose work has been widely published, translated, and anthologized across the United States, Latin America, and Europe. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Deuda natal / Natal Debt, which received the Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing explores language, place, ecology, and translation, and has appeared in journals, collaborative projects, and international platforms. She is an Associate Professor at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, where she leads the Creative Writing and Literature Program and helped design the institution’s first doctoral program.

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator of trans experience. The 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, he has received the Premio Nuevas Voces and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize, among other awards and recognitions. His eight poetry books include lo terciario/ the tertiary (Noemi, 2019), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds LLC, 2019), which inspired the title of the exhibition no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. His poetry has been musicalized by Angélica Negrón, Jonathan Woody and Anaïs Mejías.