Nicholas Patrick Quigley
Educator, Musician, and Expressive Arts Practitioner in Fall River, MA
Nicholas Patrick Quigley (he/they) is a compassionate, inquisitive educator, creative musician, and expressive arts practitioner. Their radically inclusive instruction and project-based curriculum empowers students to write and produce original music stemming from themes of identity and culture. Quigley’s varied, but dedicated service throughout their career has included founding an alternative high school’s modern band, creating a trauma-responsive music group for elementary students, forming a middle school guitar/ukulele program, co-coordinating state-wide music education festivals for contemporary musics, facilitating a high school expressive arts club, leading beginning band classes, conducting elementary choirs and beginner–intermediate string ensembles, and organizing educators for equitable schooling policies.
As an artist, Quigley started writing songs in high school and exploring meditative improvisation early in university. Their discography now spans a diverse array of acoustic, electronic, generative, soundscape, ambient, and alternative musics. Inspired by integrative and avant-garde approaches, Quigley has studied in creative workshops with Brian Eno, Laraaji, Meredith Monk, and the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer. With a particular interest in composing to develop ecological consciousness, Quigley earned a certificate in Ecopsychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute. Their body of work includes themes of climate change and terrapsychology, neurodiversity, contemporary global political issues, and the worlds of dreams.
Quigley has presented at research- and practice-oriented conferences, and published in the Journal of Popular Music Education, Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning, Teaching Music, and the Massachusetts Music Educators Journal. In their scholarship, they have focused on the educational backgrounds of DIY musicians, applying eco-literate and eco-conscious pedagogy and philosophy in praxis, and integrating intermodal expressive arts in formal music learning environments.