CCS BARD

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances as MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtrienniale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). She has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, Ensemble Dedalus, Mivos String Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts with additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her work 2023 “Motor Tapes” was included as part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial. As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.