Christina Mattei

Christina Mattei in front of a dark urban backdrop and tilting her head to the side
Faculty

Music Business, Entrepreneurship & Technology (BS)

Christina Mattei is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator who works bicoastally in the local tristate area and Los Angeles. She is an adjunct professor at UArts and an adjunct associate professor at Berklee College of Music online.

Biography 

Christina Mattei composes and produces music for pop, film, dance, and immersive interdisciplinary performance. She is best-known for being one of the first women to tour, perform, and use advances interdisciplinary and sensory-based work in Ableton Live, a progressive, innovative music software, starting in 2005. Mattei focuses on combining future technology in production, live instrumentation, vocal processing styles, and improvisational forms in the electronic, pop, classical, and jazz sectors.

Experience

  • Performance

    • Mattei’s music producer and artist monikers are Christina Teleaer and RYAT. She has released music on Brainfeeder Records and Ninja Tune. Some artists Mattei has worked with include Taylor McFerrin, Mark Guiliana, King Britt, Hagar Ben Ari, Tim Lefebvre, Calvin Weston, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Terrace Martin, and choreographers Jasmine Hearne and Kate Watson-Wallace. Her performance career led her to sharing musical stages with artists like Thom Yorke, Questlove, Giles Peterson, and Amon Tobin, and she has toured extensively around the world, performing at events like Fashion Week in Tokyo and Coachella. 

  • Composing

    • Mattei has scored for a live orchestra as a featured composer, presented by the prestigious Echo Society—a collective of top composers in Los Angeles (Rob Simonson, Brendan Anjelese, Joe Trapanese, Deru, Justin Crane), which launched opportunities for writing for TV and film. Her film collaboration for Tasting the Moon, a documentary about women graffiti artists in Afghanistan, won Best Music Video at the Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival and Best Short at the 10th Annual Indie Fest USA International Film Festival. For that score, she sampled traditional Afghani instrumentation and infused hip hop and orchestral compositional elements.

  • Interdisciplinary Works

    • Mattei’s largest interdisciplinary work debuted in Central Park and was funded by Summerstage. There, in collaboration with Kate Watson-Wallace, she presented “ALTMODE,” a future interactive–technology, feminist-focused dance piece that combines multimedia, interactive technology, music, and dance. Mattei has featured VR audio/visual scores in collaboration with Kate Parsons for FEMBIT and presented pieces of her audio/visual installations at Mack Sennett Studios in LA and Columbia College in Chicago. She has also presented collaborations with Painted Bride Art Center and the Philadelphia International Fine Arts Festival.

    • Mattei is currently composing new music for electronics and small orchestras, as well as working with creative tech artist Dr. Kate Stone on a new interdisciplinary piece that features fashion sculpture, movements, and immersive, interactive audio/visual compositions, presented with BlueTooth technology.

Visit Christina Mattei’s website. 

Awards & Accolades

  • Mattei is a member of the Grammy Recording Academy; Women in Music; and She is the Music, Alicia Keys’ organization. 

  • She has been a panelist for Women In Music, Beats By Girls, We Make Noise, Ableton Live, and at multiple universities in her area of expertise.

  • Tasting the Moon, a documentary about women graffiti artists in Afghanistan, won Best Music Video at the Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival and Best Short at the 10th Annual Indie Fest USA International Film Festival. 

Christina’s music was described as ‘beat couture’ by the Potholes blog and ‘LA's Bjork,’ by Spin magazine.