MASI ASARE
Associate Artistic Director
masi@rawimpressions.org

Masi Asare is a composer/lyricist, singer/actress, producer, and voice coach. Masi grew up in central Pennsylvania, the daughter of a Ghanaian professor and an American sociologist/writer. She holds a B.A. magna cum laude in Performance Studies from Harvard University, where she created her own curriculum combining music, theatre, and cultural studies.

Masi worked as a staff songwriter for the Kidstock Theatre (Winchester, MA) for five years, where she wrote some sixty songs for children’s musicals, including: A Hundred and One Dinosaurs, Jack and the Bean’s Talk Show, Around the World in Many Plays, and Charlotte’s Website. In 1999 the Pocket Full of Tales Theatre company (Boston) commissioned her to write the score for a new children’s musical The Knight Who Was Afraid of the Dark, which premiered in January 2000. The same year, her original musical Dances for a Journey, a tryptych about sisterhood and identity, was featured in a master class with Stephen Schwartz. The piece premiered at Harvard’s Agassiz Theatre in March 2000, earning both critical and audience acclaim.

In 2001 Masi co-founded (with writer/director Eamonn Farrell) the NYC-based Anonymous Ensemble, a performers’ lab for experimental voicework, movement and text generation exercises. She wrote music and lyrics for the Anonymous Ensemble productions Oracle (2001, The Present Company), The Emperor’s New Vestments (Creative Artists Lab, 2002), Lysistrata (Office Ops, 2003), and currently collaborates with Jim Iseman and Eamonn Farrell as a songwriter for The Best, a long form experimental rock theatre piece (9 episodes presented 2003-2005). The Best was featured at the Dixon Place Warning! Not For Broadway festival, and has also been performed at Makor, Galapagos, and the Chocolate Factory. (See www.bellyofthebest.com for details about upcoming shows).

Masi is a Composer/Lyricist member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Writing Workshop’s Advanced Class, where she is currently developing Time Will Tell, a spy musical, with bookwriter Brooke Pierce. She also collaborates with librettist Chris Kipiniak on The Judge’s Wife, a Kafkaesque thriller, which has received readings at the BMI Workshop and the Golden Fleece Composers’ Chambers Theatre. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Masi has been working with Raw Impressions since November 2003, participating in events as a composer, actor, and producer. As a performer, she has also appeared regionally as Sarah’s Friend in Ragtime, Ronnette in Little Shop of Horrors, and Dionne in Hair; and in countless NYC readings and workshops of new musicals. She has performed as a soloist with the Kuumba Singers gospel choir in concert for Nelson Mandela, and with new music group Alarm Will Sound singing selections from John Adams’ songplay I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw The Sky.