Biography

Amigo’s current research interests include the electric and acoustic guitar in improvised music, soundscape design, jazz music theory and arranging, theatrical sound design and pedagogy, legacy and immersive mixing, soul, jazz, rock, Afro-Latin music, symbolic notation, and the history and performance of Jamaican dub mixing. He works to make music/sound/composition accessible to composers, musicians, designers, visual artists and other non-traditional sound students. His awards include a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (music composition), and a Senior Fulbright Scholar/Artist Fellowship (Bolivia). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Oxford Press) contains an entry on his early works. 

Upcoming in 2025, is Amigo’s contribution to the new Routledge edition of the classic Sound and Music for the Theatre: The Art and Technique of Design by Deena Kaye and James Lebrecht. Amigo is also composing music for Nuyorican sculptor Jorge Luis Rodriguez’s summer 2025 career retrospective in NYC. Working projects include the musical Angry Little Girls by cartoonist Lela Lee and playwright Alice Tuan, and Elemental, a sound collaboration with painter/philosopher Alejandro Vallega.

Recent productions include Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan’s play Morountodun in LA, and the geo-located theater/music/sound piece Lives of the New Kind of Saints (texts by playwright Migdalia Cruz) selected by USITT (United States Institute of Theater Technology) as a featured American design @ PQ23 (Prague Quadrennial 2023). Also, music performances for ReSeeding: jill sigman /thinkdance’s environmentally-themed 25th Anniversary Celebration @ Gibney Dance Center (NYC); original songs for Sandra Delgado’s play Havana Madrid (Chicago, NYC, LA); sound/music for Heading Into Night: A Clown Play [Forgetting], by Daniel Passer (Cirque du Soleil) @ The Cherry Arts (Ithaca, NY); La Egoista by Erlina Ortiz @ Skylight Theater (LA); immersive sound design for Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu & Her Friends @ CalArts MOD. 

2022 projects included the world premiere of Octavio Solis’ Scenes With Cranes at REDCAT (LA), José Rivera’s References To Salvador Dali Make Me Hot @ CSULA, and Tara Ricasa’s The Goddess of Lost Things @ Bocón Festival of New Works (San Diego). 

Pandemic-era productions included music/sound for Young Joo Lee’s digital animation/installation Jaguar’s Vision @ The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), Ochi Projects LA, ALT LOOP Space (Seoul), South Korean public television (KBS); Maggie Bofill’s short film Cuban American Gothic @ PBS Latino Experience; jill sigman /thinkdance’s (NYC) environmental justice platform Ritual; Healthcare by Design’s palliative care and first responders immersive installations @ Henry Mayo Hospital in Santa Clarita, California; and as geo-based land acknowledgements for the Tataviam and Chumash people of Southern California.

Amigo has also collaborated with hundreds of diverse theater, music, film, and dance artists. His work has been presented and supported by institutions including the Flea Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, PUBLIC Theater, Rattlestick Theater, Ma-Yi Theater Company, LAByrinth Theater, Cherry Lane Theater, Woolly Mammoth, Grand Performances (LA), New Dramatists, 59E59, ASK Playwright/Composer Lab, Sundance Institute Film Composer Labs, Asian Pacific Performance Exchange (APPEX/UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance), World Festival of Sacred Music (LA), Vision Festival (NYC), NYC Latin Free Jazz Festival, and the Alternative Guitar Festival, among many others.

As a researcher and ethnographer with fieldwork experience, Amigo’s educational materials are drawn from many diverse cultural, historical, critical, and scientific contexts. Among them, Jimi Hendrix channeling electrons and voltage live at the Fillmore East in 1969, Japanese Gagaku Court Music, Arnhem Land art and music, aesthetics and structures in Javanese Gamelan, the Kaluli people of New Guinea listening to Miles Davis’ Nefertiti, Afro-Cuban rumba and religious music, harmonic principles in Steely Dan’s Babylon Sisters, Pauline Oliveiros, John Cage, Igor Stravinsky, Messiaen, Sound Designer Walter Murch’s sound techniques in Apocalypse Now, circuit theory, the physics of waves, psychoacoustics, the underwater deep sound channel, bird-listening, trigonometry, calculus, and more. 

Amigo is currently an artist-in-residence at INTAR Latino Theater in New York City. From 2019-2025, he was sound practices faculty in the Department of Experience Design and Production in the CalArts School of Theater. Amigo earned a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from UCLA where he studied with masters from various performance traditions.

Amigo joined the Bennington faculty in Fall 2025.