Zeena Parkins

Bio:

Zeena Parkins is an electroacoustic musician, composer, and instrument designer based in New York, United States. Recognized as a pioneer of contemporary harp performance and a mainstay of the New York downtown music scene, her work engages extended techniques, object preparations, and electronic interactions to expand the instrument’s possibilities. Working within a shifting constellation of improvisation and composition, Parkins’s interstitial practice explores translations of sound, often in multichannel environments that are at once architectural, emotional, topographical, and social. Her work draws on collections, lists, historical proximities, tactility, spatiality, and movement, revealing a sonic social presence through timbral shifts, feedback, dynamic extremes, and gestural configurations in and out of the body, as well as psychoacoustic residues.