Julia Gytri & Avi Amon

JULIA: I first discovered musical theatre through community theatre productions as a little, little kid when my family lived in Alamogordo, NM. Standard stuff, like Cats, 1776, The Secret Garden, Jesus Christ Superstar... those casts had a BLAST step-ball-changing and singing those songs for our town. Watching anyone have that much fun is contagious.

AVI: Growing up in Rochester, NY, my high school line-up of musicals was: West Side Story, Carousel, Anything Goes, and Damn Yankees. Very proud to have hit the apex of my acting career at 18.

JULIA: I was a big-time band geek in high school and really only did theatre on the side because I thought the only job you could have was acting. I was serious about music and composition, but then I discovered playwriting in college and realized the two could be combined, so I went on to earn an MFA in musical theatre writing. Along the way, studying scores like West Side Story, Sunday in the Park, Floyd Collins, and Passing Strange among others, made me feel like the form could be anything, and it was thrilling.

AVI: I’ve studied piano since I was five and have been doodling melodies ever since. But I truly began writing when I was working in the admissions office at the University of Delaware, where I created Delaware: The Musical—essentially an absurd, heartfelt ad campaign for the school. That project became the core of my grad school application to NYU, where I formally began writing for theater. I moved to New York soon after, and the rest is history. A few writers and artists who continue to inspire me include Adam Guettel, Gabriel Kahane, Laurie Anderson, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Wendy Carlos, David Yazbek, Caroline Shaw, and Dave Malloy.

JULIA: Feminist, challenging, tension-packed, and often (but not always) with a Southwestern vibe

AVI: My work blurs the lines between music theater, sound installation, pop, and musique concrète. While I often draw from my own musical lineages—from my family’s history in Turkey to growing up in the U.S. in the ’90s and early 2000s—I’m most excited by the act of dissolving into the unique musical language of each project. I love being a chameleon in that way, collaboratively shaping sound worlds that are deeply embedded in the storytelling.

JULIA: Being part of the group of people having fun! Making the fun!

AVI: For me, the most rewarding part of writing music is its power to communicate beyond language. I work across theater, film, dance, and other multidisciplinary forms, and in each, music becomes an emotional undercurrent—shaping how we understand story, place, and feeling. Sound can carry memory, suggest meaning, and deepen connection through abstraction. Collaboratively shaping these aural experiences allows me to participate in meaning-making that is at once intimate and collective. That resonance—when something invisible alters how we perceive the world or each other—is what keeps me coming back.