Evren Celimli was born in New York City in 1971.
“But even before that, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky were my playmates in the womb,” Evren asserts. “My mother curated an in utero playlist and shared it with me by placing headphones on her belly.”
Music came naturally to him as a child., for better or worse. He learned the recorder at age 5 and violin lessons began at 8. At 11 years old Evren attended the New England Conservatory of Music’s extension school for theory, composition and piano lessons. While he learned a thing or two, he was very upset to miss all the Saturday morning cartoons.
Evren attended a tiny high school in Boston, the Commonwealth School, with an amazing music program. Evren discovered he loved to sing, he was overcome by jazz and fusion music, decided he was a composer, and as a senior, received the Harvard Musical Association’s Achievement Award.
Evren received his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University (1993) where he was introduced to a Buchla Modular Synthesizer at a music department meet and greet. He learned to splice analog tape while interning at WGBH radio. He also found that he loved writing poetry while taking classes with poet-in-residence, Olga Broumas. He was so inspired that he actually had a poem published in the Spring 1992 issue of Gordon Lish’s The Quarterly magazine.
He got his first taste of scoring to picture with the short film Eugenia’s Crown which premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and played at the Louvre in Paris.
He earned a master’s degree in Music Composition at the University of Sussex (1995) in the U.K. After graduation his compositions were performed, (sometimes poorly because they were too rhythmically complex), at new music festivals both in the United States and Europe.
In 1996 Evren returned to NYC to make his fortune. He took up residence at Ozzie’s Coffee on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, where he met his wife and spent all his earnings on coffee.
Strung out on caffe mochas, he found himself waist-deep in the downtown avant-garde dance and theater world. He composed and designed sound for 15 productions over a three-year period including two Richard Foreman plays, a wild production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, and a dance/theatre piece that was performed at the Here Theater / American Living Room Festival.
His first collaboration with choreographer Doug Elkins premiered at the Joyce Theater in NYC and traveled to Queen Elizabeth Hall in London over Thanksgiving weekend. (Thanksgiving is not celebrated in the U.K., btw.)
Movement Mandalas, a collaboration with choreographer Murray Spalding, are a series of meditational dance pieces performed at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C., the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, as well as at Dancespace in NYC.
In 2003 Evren completed his first (and only) ballet, The New Rome, a commission from Guggenheim award winning choreographer Leigh Witchel.
In 2005 Evren was awarded a New England Foundation for the Arts / National Dance Project production grant with choreographer Ben Munisteri. Their collaboration, Thunderblood, premiered at Jacob’s Pillow in July 2005.
Evren was invited by Francis Mason, the editor of Ballet Review Magazine, to contribute an essay about collaborating with choreographers. “The Collaborative Spiral” was published in the Spring 2007 issue.
Evren also dabbled in music for commercials, scoring an award winning Ogilvy television commercial for TIAA-Cref. He also scored a black and white elves-frolicking-in-the-woods short for haute couture designer Morgane Le Fay.
Can’t forget that Evren mixed the title track, “Now I Understand” for a CD released by the band Club d’Elf which featured John Medeski of MMW and many other talented musicians. Evren produced for several independent record labels and did remix work for Arista and Sony Germany. In 2005 Evren had a private meeting with the sultan of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun who sadly passed away before a second meeting could be scheduled.
Evren finally ended his relationship with music making in 2013, turning his attention to family, historic building restoration, chainsaws, and words. He still does some audio editing from time to time, because it’s fun.
In May 2025 he graduates from Harvard University’s Extension Division with a master’s degree in Creative Writing and Literature where, for his thesis, he completed a memoir that tackles a variety of themes including magic, memory, music, nature, love, loss, grief, and embracing the moment.
He’s currently seeking a literary agent… maybe there’s one in those woods…
