Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental composer, sound artist, and sculptor who thinks about our resonating world. She is curious about entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and climate, architecture and sound. Her projects explore collaboration, cohabitation and interdependence with soniferous animals and environments, imagining futurities which complexify our relationships to sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and renewal, kinship and care, climate grief and climate futurities.
Rigby works with the viola, pipe organ and sea caves to create multi-sensorial, community-activated performances. Her performances pull questions about collectivity, interconnection and attention into relation with one another to ask: what happens to our understandings of kinship, care and worlding, and time when we expand our human-centered understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans? What does it mean to share physical and acoustical space with a vibrant spectrum of more-than-humans living on this planet? What can we learn from thinking about relationships among sound and ecosystem health, resonance and geologic time, listening and more-than-human intelligence? What does it mean to listen deeply in times of climate crisis? What are some relationships among radical noticing and regenerative worldmaking, ecology and history, listening / sounding as social practice, shifting seascapes and environmental phenomena, sensory perception of resonance and vibration, interspecies relationships and sensory ecology?
Rigby researches relationships among resonance and vibration, rupture and repair, degeneration and regeneration. What is the connection between the history of a site and its resonance, its acoustical signature? Between ecological, material and sonic decay? Can finding new ways to listen to and think about a site’s resonance—that of a sea cave for instance, or a cathedral—-catalyze new ways of thinking about more-than-human timescales or even accelerating geological timescales? What can we collectively learn about our rapidly changing world by finding new ways to experience listening, to pay attention? What does it mean to find new ways to listen—for example via vibration, tactility, and bone conduction— and to pay attention in these uncertain times? How can listening help us reimagine new ecologies and interspecies futures? Can exploring different means of sensing support radical re-imaginings of potential ecological futurities? Can paying attention manifest as a kind of political act?
Her projects range from interactive operas to harmonic and tonal experimentations on viola and pipe organ to immersive multisensorial installations that explore the edges of our perception and reconfigure viewers as performers. Rigby’s performances hybridize field recordings, pipe organ drones, and harmonic textures on the viola with expansive, multi-channel moving visuals. Collaborating with found objects and found sites—such as sea caves, thousand-year-old trees and waste sites—Rigby composes vibrant sound works that pull us into the sonic and sensory worlds of more-than-humans like sea stars, bats and beetles. She transforms sea caves into walk-in cellos, places from which to contemplate deep time and deep listening. She queers the potentials of prepared pipe organ, welds salvaged brass instruments and objects into blasting foghorns, and renders ancient bristlecone pine trees soniferous. Her works explore the sonic signatures of resonant sites, ecological systems and environmental phenomena, make audible the inaudible, and bring us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard.
Rigby thinks about acoustics and architecture, soniferous more-than-humans and string harmonics, living fossils and long time, multitudinous means of knowing and worlding, multispecies ecologies, resonant space and vibration, metamorphosis, deep time, dissonance, waste streams, ecotones, interspecies collaboration, sustained sound, sea caves and fever dreams. What are new ways of learning from the intelligences of other living beings? 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?
Julia Edith Rigby (b. 1990, USA) has performed at 316Centro in CDMX (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). 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. She was recently awarded an artist residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon. 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 GlougauAIR Artist Residency in Berlin, PLAYA Summer Lake, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Kala Art Institute, and others. Rigby has exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, 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.
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