Susan Maughlin Wood

Composer for Media and Concert Music

Seattle, WA USA

…is an award-winning independently contracting composer and artist seeking opportunities in film, educational apps, games and other media. While engaged in writing concert repertoire and chamber arrangements she is a visionary of passion projects including festival hits music video “Spectratta” (and its offshoot Butoh dance-fusion “Spectrutoh”) as well as documusic film “Coastal Fire: A Common Diary” which details the emotional fallout from the 2016 US presidential election on a personal and societal level, and which is every bit as relevant for the current election cycle. Susan holds a Master of Music in Film Composition from the Pacific NW Film Scoring Program at SFI, and served as Past President on the Board of Directors of the Seattle Composers Alliance.

ArtOut: Queering the Pandemic June 1st-30th 2022

ArtOut: Queering the Pandemic June 1st-30th 2022

The art quilt “COVID Reset” was featured in the ArtOut exhibit “Queering the Pandemic” in the Gulfport, Florida Public Library for Pride Month June 1-30, 2022. Prints and other products available at Society6

“COVID Reset” art quilt, Susan Maughlin Wood, 2022

Covid is a society-wide low tide that exposed our inequalities like nothing before, with truths no longer deniable about how our systems truly were designed to function for the powerful and malfunction for the marginalized. The world ends again and again in waves of political upheaval, the latest of which includes legislatures in a third of our states attempting to define parental support of trans kids as child abuse. The fact that many kids carried out medical and social transitions during relatively safe stretches of school lockdowns was one more “threat” these transphobic laws are clearly designed to quell.

In the early days of the pandemic I adapted online mask patterns and sewed over 300 reversible, filter-ready cloth masks for friends, family, and a local Crafters Against Covid-19 group. The Covid Reset quilt was born of a need to step back during a “breather” and attempt to process the magnitude of what the world had suffered and continues to suffer from a maddeningly ill-managed pandemic. A corona(virus) of cloth masks in various stages of completion asks the perpetually unanswered question: is it RISING or is it SETTING? The moon hangs next to it, a pseudo-magical orb of hopeful vaccination, spiky on the inside but absent the teeth to truly eradicate the virus in the face of maddening skepticism and disinformation surrounding the vaccine and masking. The floating triangle under a reflecting surface embodies unseen and, for both good and ill, unlearned systems – that is, we struggle to unlearn our various intersectional bigotries as we inadvertently also unlearn or forget the shared factors that could unite us against humanity’s darkest tendencies toward conquest, division and destruction.

Humanity has been given a reset button in this self-aware period of history. Are we going to fall to fascim again or can we rise up en masse, in finally enough mass to make real the ideals of equality we claim to embody?