Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sound, performance, video, installation
Website: pamelaz.com
Pamela Z was born in 1956 and has lived and worked in San Francisco for most of her adult career. She received a Bachelor of Music in vocal music and education from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1978. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she is widely regarded as one of the foundational figures of live electronic music performance. She is represented in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, the Tang Museum, the Dakar Biennale in Sénégal, and the Kitchen in New York.
Her awards are extensive: the Rome Prize (American Academy in Rome), the Berlin Prize (American Academy in Berlin), the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Dorothea Tanning Award, the United States Artists Fellowship, the MIT McDermott Award, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the Creative Capital Fund, the MAP Fund, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She has received commissions from Kronos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, Eighth Blackbird, The Living Earth Show, Bang on a Can All Stars, the LA Philharmonic New Music Group, and Julia Bullock with the San Francisco Symphony.
Pamela Z works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video — a practice that has made her one of the defining figures of the live electronic music and sound art world since the mid-1980s. Her approach is rooted in the possibilities of her own voice, which she processes in real time using MAX MSP software and custom wireless MIDI controllers, building dense, complex sonic layers through looping, sampling, and manipulation. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrete sounds. Her performances range from intimate gallery concerts to large-scale multi-media works in theaters and concert halls; her installations use multi-channel sound and video in gallery contexts. She has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, performing at the Venice Biennale, the Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival, Other Minds in San Francisco, Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center, the Japan Interlink Festival, and the Dakar Biennale. She has collaborated with Joan La Barbara, Joan Jeanrenaud, Brenda Way (ODC Dance), Miya Masaoka, and Kronos Quartet, among many others.
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