Renée Baker, founding music director and conductor of the internationally acclaimed Chicago Modern Orchestra Project, has composed more than 2,000 works for ensembles, including numerous commissioned pieces for the Chicago Sinfonietta and the Chicago Sinfonietta Chamber Ensemble, Berlin international Brass, Joffrey Ballet Chamber Series, Dance Wright Project SF, and many others. In composing for silent cinema, she has created cutting-edge original scores for more than 100 films and performed her work at live screening events, film festivals with orchestras, and ensembles across the globe. Renée’s film score recordings include Body and Soul (1925), Broken Blossoms (1919), Women of Ryazan (1927), An Orphan (1929), Birth of a Nation (1915), A Natural Born Gambler (1916), and The Bluebird (1918), to name a few. Her own experimental forays into surrealistic filmmaking have resulted in 30 one-hour films entitled OUTEREXTREMIA Artfilm Cinema series, currently being screened around the country and abroad in alternative cinema locations.
