Patricia Alessandrini is a composer and sound artist creating interactive and intermedia compositions, installations, and performance situations. Through these media, she actively engages with social and political issues, including questions of representation and canonicity. She is also a performer and improvisor of live electronics, and designs her own instruments and interfaces.
Alessandrini studied composition and electronics at the Conservatorio di Bologna, Conservatoire National de Strasbourg and IRCAM, and holds two Ph.D.s from Princeton University and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) respectively. She has taught computer-assisted composition at the Accademia Musicale Pescarese, composition with technology at Bangor University, sonic arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and currently performs research on embodied interaction, immersive audiovisual experience and accessible instrument design at CCRMA (Stanford). She serves on the international board of Share Music & Performing Arts.
Her works have been presented in the Americas, Asia, Australia, and over 15 European countries. She was composer-in-residence at the 2010 soundSCAPE festival, and featured in ICELab with the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2012. In 2015-2016, she was featured as a composer, curator and educator in four concert and outreach events of the Ensemble InterContemporain, as part of the Sound Kitchen series at the Gaîté lyrique, a centre for digital arts in Paris. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021, and a Radcliffe Fellowship for 2024-25.
At MacDowell, she will be worked on a futurist intermedia music theater work set in outer space for coloratura virtuosi Marisol Montalvo and Donatienne Michel-Dansac and ensemble, based on a libretto by novelist and Fellow Alexandra Kleeman. Calling on her previous experience designing and building electronic interfaces, robotic systems and instruments, it will include "intelligent" soft robotics systems with musical and visual interest.
