Geoff Farina

Guitarist/songwriter Geoff Farina has spent the past three decades performing original music in the US, Europe, and Japan, and recording as a solo artist and with his bands Exit Verse, Glorytellers, and Karate. He has composed and performed film music for festivals in the US and Europe, and has performed with Michael Zerang, Massimo Pupillo, Taylor Ho Bynum, Elizabeth Mitchell, Thalia Zedek, and Alan Sparhawk. Geoff is a founding member of the Tenco Award-winning Roman folk group Ardecore, and together with guitarist Chris Brokaw he has recorded three albums of American blues and country obscurities. Geoff’s work with the seminal 90’s indie band Karate includes seven albums and additional recordings that are being reissued by Numero Group.

At home in Chicago, Geoff occasionally performs the solo guitar arrangements of Elizabeth Cotten, Norman Blake, Clarence White, Doc Watson, Blind Blake, and other American roots guitarists. Geoff is one-half of the acoustic duo The Last Kind Words with mandolinist Kenneth P.W. Rainey, and he performs the music of Scott Joplin with The Great Crush, a ragtime quartet fronted by pianist Marc Riordan.

In addition to DePaul, Geoff has taught at Colby College and the University of Maine, and he has been invited to lecture at Columbia College, the University of Massachusetts, and the De Provinciale Hogeschool Van Limburg in Hasselt, Belgium. His music technology articles for Tape Op Magazine have been anthologized in Tape Op: The Book About Creative Music Recording. He and his wife Caterina Mongiat Farina recently translated Umberto Eco’s classic Italian style manual Come si fa una tesi di laurea (How to Write a Thesis) into English for MIT Press.