Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental composer and sound artist who thinks about our wild and resonating worlds—the world we inhabit now, and worlds that have come and gone. She thinks about lithic histories, the stories of sites that have borne witness to our collective past and to the processes that shaped our planet and who we are. She explores entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and ecology, fever dreams and resonance, acoustical architecture and history. Her compositions research relationships among sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and renewal, climate memory and vibratory architectures, seismic listening and lithic empathy. What happens when we bring deep listening, deep feeling, and deep time into conversation?
Rigby works at the interstices of sound art, video art, improvisation and installation to create immersive and interactive live performance experiences. She queers the boundaries of pipe organ and prepared piano. She experiments with viola and field recordings, contact microphones and keys, sea caves and geophone technology to activate new ways of listening, and to transform both human and more-than-human architectures into ephemeral instruments and reactive artistic collaborators. Her performances pull questions about collectivity, interconnection and attention into relation with one another to ask: what happens to our understandings of care, worldmaking, and natural history when we expand our understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans? What can we collectively learn about our rapidly changing world—and our relationships with other living things, with ourselves--by finding new ways to think about listening? And how can listening help us imagine new futures in times of uncertainty?
Rigby’s work is a call to community. Her collective, audience-activated performances explore listening as an expression of care, attention, and collective resistance. They blur the boundaries between perception and technology, ancient planetary history and contemporary ritual. Through interactive scores and seismological technologies, viewers / listeners transmogrify into fellow performers. Her outdoor operas-in-the-round and her site-responsive performances in resonant spaces create new commons for strangers to become collaborators in the creation of social experiences. She hybridizes immersive video art, ephemeral sound sculpture and improvisational instrumentation to cultivate attunement to our surroundings as well as to one another.
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, Kala Art Institute, GlogauAIR and others. Rigby has exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Rotterdam and Berlin. Rigby 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.
“The album’s opening piece is a massive 30-minute opus for organ that demonstrates its startling power. Then, in a series of short pieces dedicated to sea creatures, Rigby focuses on the ways that animals experience the world, sometimes in ways beyond the human sensorium: bats echolocating, sea stars walking on glass, hagfish feeding, and octopuses exploring. The juxtaposition of this wide selection of wild critters raises questions about who and what we share the earth with—where are the limits of our experience of the world, and how might we learn from other ways of being?” —Matthew Blackwell, “Best Field Recordings on July 2025,” Bandcamp
