Percussionist, conductor and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family.  For the past thirty years he has championed contemporary percussion music as a performer and teacher, by commissioning and premiering more than one hundred new works for percussion. Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego and a Consulting Artist in Percussion at the Manhattan School of Music. He was the percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars of New York City from 1992-2002, and from 2000 to 2004 served as Artistic Director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland.  Schick is founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group, “red fish blue fish,” and director of “Roots and Rhizomes,” a summer course on contemporary percussion music hosted at the Banff Centre for the Arts.  In 2007 assumed the post of Music Director and conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, and is the principal guest conductor of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).