Heather Christian is a singer, playwright, composer and recent winner of a MacArthur "genius grant."

Her compositions use spiritual music forms to explore themes as varied as ghosts, grief, the Odyssey and the Big Bang. She describes them as " choral-based complex music theater works." They are often presented in the round, in part to obliterate the hierarchy between audience and performers.

"I'm interested in existence. I'm interested in unanswerable questions," she says in our interview. "Our lives have become so much about the in and out business of our civilization. The email, the phone alerts, the economy. When you zoom way way out, all of those things seem so arbitrary and small. I wanted [to] imagine what it would be like if we had the time, space and bandwidth to ask the big questions - like why and how we are here."

Heather's two best known works are Animal Wisdom, which was staged in 2017, and Oratorio for Living things, which has been staged three times, including a string of extremely sold-out performances in 2022.

Originally from Natchez, Mississippi, Heather has lived in Beacon for 13 years, largely under the radar.

"I've tried to keep a separation of church and state. Beacon is church," she says. "Beacon reminded me a lot of my hometown. There's something about river people. There's a reverence to the landscape you're inhabiting. We use it, it grounds us."