A versatile performer, composer and arranger, Mark Duggan has been active in multiple musical genres for over 40 years. Duggan's passionate blend of contemporary percussion idioms has impressed audiences worldwide including performances with the Philip Glass Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain de Paris with Pierre Boulez, the percussion group Nexus, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, New Music Concerts and the Esprit Orchestra. Duggan has collaborated with many contemporary composers including Jorg Widman, Vinko Globokar, Nicole Lizeé, George Benjamin, Toru Takemitsu, Mychael Danna, George Crumb, Matthias Pintscher, Charles Wuorinen, and Lou Harrison. He is also a founding member of the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan (since 1983) which has toured throughout Europe, Asia and the US.
Duggan has worked with many jazz and popular music artists including Diana Krall, Charlie Haden, Maria Schneider, Petula Clark, Kiran Ahluwalia, Maryem Tollar, Sylvia Tyson, Andy Stochansky, Nelly Furtado, Oliver Schroer, Don Ross, Kevin Barrett and Rufus Wainwright. For ten years Duggan performed and recorded extensively with his own group, Vuja dé. He has been deeply involved with Brazilian music for over thirty years performing and/or recording with Celso Machado, Guinga, Henrique Cazes, Wagner Petrilli, Pedro Quental, Marco Tulio and Rogerio Souza among others. Duggan also performs regularly in the musical theatre scene with local Toronto and touring productions. As a session musician, Duggan has played on dozens of film and commercial soundtracks and has appeared on over 100 other recordings. He has released six CDs of his own music which have received multiple award nominations from both the Juno and East Coast Music Awards. Duggan's most recent recordings are Talismã - a collection of instrumental samba and choro compositions with Brazilian guitarist Marco Tulio; and Montreux 1988 - a live recording from the Montreux Jazz Festival with the group Eye Music.
As a composer, Duggan has created music for the Esprit Orchestra, Nexus percussion group, Soundstreams Ensemble, the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, TorQ percussion, Newfoundland Sound Symposium, Roots Orchestra, Madawaska String Quartet, Gamelan Yogistragong, Sympatico Percussion, clarinetist François Houle, percussionists Morris Palter, John Rudolph, Zac Pulac, Taktus duo and choreographers Susan Cash, Susan Lee and Maxine Heppner. His compositions are performed at concert halls and universities around the world. Duggan is a graduate of the MFA program at the California Institute of the Arts where he studied with John Bergamo, Efrain Toro and James Newton; and the DMA performance program at the University of Toronto where he studied with Russell Hartenberger and Robin Engelman.