Marina Rosenfeld

Biography

Short Biography:

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across the disciplinary boundaries of music and visual art, she has created a body of work spanning sound, music and performance, sculpture and works on paper. Rosenfeld has created commissioned works for the Museum of Modern Art, the Park Avenue Armory, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Fondacion Serralves and the Guggenheim Museum among many others, and participated in surveys including the Whitney Biennial (in 2002 and 2008), the Aurora, Montréal and Liverpool biennials, PERFORMA, and ‘Every Time A Ear di Soun,’ the radio program of documenta14. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions by institutions including Kunsthaus Baselland (2021), The Artist’s Institute (2019), Portikus Frankfurt (2017), and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2016), and in the contemporary music context, the Holland Festival, Musica Strasbourg, Borealis, Ultima, Wien Modern, Borderlines, Tectonics, and Donaueschinger Musiktage, among many others. As a turntablist, Rosenfeld has performed and recorded improvised music for almost three decades, including for the Merce Cunningham Company between 2004 and 2008. Her recordings are on Room40, Shelter Press, 901Editions and forthcoming in 2023 on INFO Unltd.

Long Biography:

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in Brooklyn NY. Her works explore the material traces of sensory experience, especially through sound and its mis en scène. Her works in diverse media— sculpture and drawing, installation and performance—emblematize the temporal disorientation of listening, offering image, sound and object as speculative supplements to the intimate, corporeal address of music.

Rosenfeld mounted her first all-woman Sheer Frost Orchestra as a student at CalArts in Los Angeles in 1993; that work has been widely performed ever since with recent premieres in Australia (2019) and Switzerland (2021). Subsequent works in the 1990s and aughts explored the staging of sound in complex sites, with attention to perception and the sexed body. In the late nineties she also began to create dub plates, developing an improvisational practice as an experimental turntablist with a distinctive palette of sounds drawn from her studio practice. From 2008, with Teenage Lontano, she turned her attention increasingly to the diffusion of the voice within complex systems, with works for choir and the notable collaboration P.A./HARD LOVE with Annette Henry, aka Warrior Queen and cellist Okkyung Lee.

Rosenfeld has created commissioned works for the Museum of Modern Art, the Park Avenue Armory, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Fondacion Serralves and the Guggenheim Museum among many others, and participated in surveys including the Whitney Biennial (in 2002 and 2008), the Montréal, Liverpool and Aurora (Dallas) biennials, the PERFORMA biennial of performance (2009 and 2011), and ‘Every Time A Ear di Soun,’ the radio program of documenta14. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions by institutions including Kunsthaus Baselland (2021),  Miguel Abreu Gallery (2021), The Artist’s Institute (2019), Portikus Frankfurt (2017), and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2016), and in the contemporary music context, the Holland Festival, Musica Strasbourg, Time:Spans, Borealis, Ultima, Wien Modern, Borderlines, Tectonics, and Donaueschinger Musiktage, among many others.

Rosenfeld’s collaborators include the core group Marino Formenti, Okkyung Lee, George Lewis, Christian Marclay, Greg Fox, Eli Kezler, and Ben Vida. Between 2004 and 2008, she performed frequently with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and more recently created scores for choreographers Ralph Lemon and Maria Hassabi. Her recordings are mainly on Room40, Shelter Press, 901Editions and forthcoming in 2023 on INFO Unltd.

Rosenfeld is a founding member of the Board of Directors of NY-based experimental arts platform Blank Forms and a member of the Artist Advisory Board of the Kitchen. She was a faculty member of the Bard College MFA program from 2003 to 2021, and co-chair of its Music/Sound discipline from 2007-2021. She currently teaches in the Sonic Arts MFA at Brooklyn College. Rosenfeld has received many honors, including a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award, the Inga Otto Maren Fellowship of the Watermill Foundation, and an Artist in Residency in Experiments in Art and Technology at Bell Labs Nokia. She has been a visiting artist and lecturer in diverse contexts from Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Rutgers, NYU, UCLA, the CUNY Center for the Humanities and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, to the HKW, the Kitchen, the New Museum, and the Austrian Cultural Forum..