Zeena Parkins
The work of Zeena Parkins is driven by a spirit of immaculate rigor and boundless creativity, making her one of the most sought-after artists in a stunning variety of disciplines: artistic and academic alike.
Biography
Parkins' innovative harp-technique is rivaled only by her inventive harp-design, as she employs both idiom-agnostic strategies for extending the sonic possibilities of the acoustic harp and electric instruments of her own making. Her 30+ year career has been decorated by honors as prestigious as the Guggenheim Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Doris Duke Award, NYSCA; multiple residencies, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, DAAD, Ucross, and museum features; and of course, innumerable collaborations with visual artists, filmmakers, dancers, and fellow musicians calculating Ikue Mori, Bjork, Butch Morris, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Laetitia Sonami, William Winant, TILT BRASS and the Eclipse Quartet. New collaborations have come to the foreground with Cecilia Lopez, Robert AA Lowe, Brian Chase, and visual artist, Vivienne Griffin.
Collaborative projects with movement artists, choreographers and filmmakers hold particular importance to Parkins. Throughout her career she has been devoted to working with choreographers including Neil Greenberg, DD Dorvillier, Jennifer Monson, Heather Kravas, John Jasperse, Jennifer Lacey, Body Cartographer Project and filmmakers Cynthia Madansky, Eleanor Bauer, Mandy MacIntosh, Abigail Child and Daria Martin. Her work with movement artists has offered Parkins a site to focus on sound movement dispersion and unusual electronic tactics.
As a multi-instrumentalist, Parkins has an active performance career, appearing at festivals including Le Guess Who? (Utrecht), Moers Festival (Moers), Tectonics (Glasgow), METEO (Mulhouse), Maerzmusik (Berlin), Counterflows (Glasgow), Beyond the Fault Line, (Mills College), Impulstanz (Vienna), Performa Biennale (NYC), Sharjah Biennale (Sharjah), International Dance Festival, (Dublin), Eurokaz International Festival of New Theater (Zagreb), Lincoln Center Out of Doors (NYC), Rewire Festival (The Hague), Berlin Jazzfest (Berlin), High Zero Festival (Baltimore), Fuji Rock Festival (Japan), Supersense (Melbourne), Earshot Jazz Festival (Seattle). Also some important venues include Café Oto (London) Dia Art Foundation (Beacon), Steim Institute (Amsterdam), Village Vanguard (NYC), Radio City Music Hall (NYC), Merkin Hall (NYC), Symphony Space (NYC), The Kennedy Center (Washington DC), Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn), The Bim Huis (Amsterdam), Berliner Festspiele (Berlin), The Kitchen (NYC), Künstlerhaus Mousontrum (Frankfurt), Redcat (LA) LAXART (LA), SFMOMA (San Francisco), MOMA (NYC), The Whitney Museum (NYC).
Parkins has performed or composed music released on labels including Corbett VS. Dempsey, Chaikin, Elektra, One Little Indian, Capital, Tzadik, Avant, Cryptogramophone, Relative Pitch, Intakt, Recommended Records, and Cuneiform. Currently, Parkins is working on a book concerning notational practices in collaboration with composer/educator, Ryan Ross Smith. In Consideration of the Score: A Compendium of Notational Strategies, will be published by no place press (NYC).
Parkins taught at The School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, at Bard College, and for thirteen years taught at Mills College until the music department was closed, where she held the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition. In 2022, Parkins was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Bard College in Fine Arts.
Parkins is a visiting faculty member at Bennington for Spring 2025.
Photo credit: Jeff Preiss