Julia Edith Rigby is a composer, improvisor and sound artist based in Santa Ana, California.
She researches ecological entanglements and sense of place, more-than-human architectures and timescales, climate memory and geological listening, planetary histories and resonance, sensory worlds and sense of time. Her compositions and performances hybridize geological field recordings and live instrumentation with electrical processing and video-based storytelling. She blends viola, effects, pedals and loops to sculpt immersive soundscapes that explore infrasound, polyphony and ancient landscapes.
Her site-specific performances in resonant spaces like cathedrals and sea caves explore questions like: what happens when we listen to a pipe organ breathing? What happens when experimental lutherie transmogrifies a sea cave into a walk-in cello? What happens when we listen to a cave with a geophone, when we hear a rock hum? How can geological listening help liberate our imaginations from the present moment, allowing us to speculate on what might have been, and what might be? To dream about not just listening to history, but shaping it?
Julia Edith Rigby (b. 1990, USA) has performed at 316Centro in CDMX (2025), The Chapel in Seattle (2025), Heidi Duckler Dance in Los Angeles (2024), LEAF Festival in Lafayette, Colorado (2024), LOW End at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska (2023), the Toulouse Theater in New Orleans (2023), Sappyfest in New Brunswick (2024) and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida (2023). Her work has been featured twice on Bandcamp’s Best Field Recordings. She is a recipient of artist grants from the LA County Department of Arts and Culture, Arts New Brunswick, the Center for Cultural Innovation and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Rigby was the Sound Art + Experimental Music Fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in fall 2023. She has been an artist in residence at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, PLAYA Summer Lake, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, GlogauAIR and others. She received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Davis (2020), where she was a recipient of the Mary Lou Osborn Award and the Fay Nelson Award.