Sunnyvale Youth Philharmonic‘s Art + Music Program bridges performing and visual arts, inviting local and international artists to engage with works inspired by our seasonal repertoire. In our inaugural 2024-25 Season, Iran-based artist and illustrator Faezeh Meraj shared her interpretation of Sheherazade through dreamlike drawings. The program includes collaboration with program directors Tatiane Santa Rosa and Rosha Motti, where they discuss the artistic dialogue between the artists’ practice and the orchestra’s musical selections. The program includes visual interventions during our concerts and concludes with a public event at the end of the season.
25-26 Season
Martha Sakellariou
Who was Georges Bizet’s Carmen? Beyond her Gypsy/wolf’s eyes…beyond her voluptuous body and fierce gaze, one that he had “never seen on any human face.” That is how French writer Prosper Mérimée described his character, Carmen, a worker at a cigarette factory in Sevilla, Spain. Can we reclaim her from the depths of her fate, which has been performed over and over again? And in reclaiming her, can we look at the role of real women in the making of classical music? How can we creatively challenge these loaded grand-narratives of women’s demise?
Sakellariou’s workshop Unlearning Carmen invites orchestra members, parents, and other members of the South Bay community to engage with the libretto of Carmen as raw material — to extract, fragment, and recompose its language into new constellations of meaning. During the Sunnyvale Youth Philharmonic’s 2025-26 season, Sakellariou will will lead at least two public workshops throughout the season.
Martha Sakellariou is a Greek-born, California-based visual artist, whose interdisciplinary practice spans multimedia installation, social engagement, and performance. Her work centers on the female experience, tracing identity and memory—both personal and collective—through domestic scenes and diasporic landscapes. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is held in private and public collections across the United States and Europe. Martha studied music at the Athens Conservatoire, she holds a BA in painting from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art, London. Since 2018, she has been a juried-in artist in residence at the City of Palo Alto’s Cubberley Artist Studio Program. www.marthasakellariou.com IG: @marthasakellariou
24-25 Season
Faezeh Meraj
Spring 25′ SYP A.I.R in Visual Art – Where Joy Blooms Concert
Faezeh Meraj is a Tehran-based artist. Holding a Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering, she also pursued intensive illustration studies under the guidance of Mohammadali Baniasadi, a celebrated Iranian artist. Meraj’s artistic practice, which encompasses collage, marker, and colored pencil techniques, centers around narrative and storytelling. Her drawings and illustrations feature delicate characters who seem to reside in a liminal space between childhood and adolescence, creating a captivating sense of wonder.
Meraj engaged in a collaborative exploration with our program directors. Together, they envisioned a visual conversation between Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade and Meraj’s own richly symbolic and character-filled imaginary landscape: What if Scheherazade were to tell us her own stories? What are her dreams? What did she imagine? Joy blooms in imagination.
