Aine Nakamura

Job title: 
Composition
Bio/CV: 
My voice is of and with my body. I pursue sensibility and spirituality as my aesthetics through a focus on the nuanced possibilities of my voice. I am song itself.

I recently focus on orality and movements of body. My theatricality is represented in my weaving of stories and imageries through my embodiment and sometimes objects. My artistic quest began as a search for my own language to embrace and express self, which cannot be told simply through one disciplinary or cultural frame. I moved closer to my woman artist identity, acknowledging my transnational complexity and ambiguity. I cross the boundaries within and outside of my body and reach out from my undefined identity. Defying traditional power structures that preclude new ways of feelings, I nurture my self, my spiritual, artistic and intellectual space, and multiple delicate stories in a new art I investigate. This is my way of showing resilience and resistance. I wish to be a song for inner, beings, and relations. My research interests are voice and body, theater and dance, war and peace, and gender and sexuality.

My recent solo performances include a winning work of Site-Specific Performance at the 2022 Venice Biennale at its 50th International Theatre Festival, and my performance project at Berliner Festspiele’s Theatertreffen 2022. I have presented my one-woman exhibition at the Gallatin Galleries in NYC (2021), my performances, installations and compositions at HfM Hanns Eisler Berlin (2022), Errant Sound (2022), A Concert of Electronic Music in honor of Mario Davidovsky (2019), Dias de Música Electroacústica (2019), New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival performed with Madeleine Shapiro (2018), October New Music Festival in Finland performed with MikroEnsemblen (2018), and Abrons Arts Center with the International Contemporary Ensemble (2019). My other appearances include The Two directed by Dmitry Krymov (New York Theater Workshop project 2019), and OPERA Ensemble at Watermill Center (2021). I am a winner of the Site-Specific Performance Grant of the Venice Biennale, and the APNM 2019 Electronic Music Competition, and an awardee of the Fulbright Fellowship (Berlin, Germany 2021-2022), The Leo Bronstein Homage Award from New York University (2020), and The Honorable Mention Award for the 2020 Pauline Oliveros New Genre Prize. I have given workshops, talks, and lecture-recitals at Berliner Festspiele, University of Pittsburgh, McGill University Schulich School of Music, and Humboldt University of Berlin. In addition to my artistic pursuit, I studied orality in ritualistic songs by women and villagers in Okinawa and Yaeyama supported by NYU Asian Pacific and American Institute, and will research peace politics and poetics, and movements of silk and people at New York Public Library as a recipient of the Short-Term Research Fellowship in 2022-2023 to inspire my art-making.

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