Cecilia Suhr is an award-winning intermedia artist and multi-instrumentalist whose work unfolds through music, visual art, and real-time audiovisual performance. Working across sound, image, and embodied gesture, she creates live, time-based experiences that foreground human presence, affect, and collective attention within increasingly mediated environments.

Her practice engages questions of human consciousness, emotion, and social experience as they are shaped by technological change. Rather than advancing fixed positions on technology, Suhr is drawn to moments of tension and ambiguity—spaces where human intuition, vulnerability, and ethical uncertainty remain active alongside computational and intelligent systems. She selectively works with emerging technologies, including AI, as tools for inquiry while critically observing how automation and digital mediation reshape perception, relationships, and shared experience.

 

Improvisation is central to her work. Her performances on violin, cello, piano, bamboo flute, and voice interact with live electronics and visual media, often dissolving boundaries between sound and image, performer and audience, digital and analog. Through these real-time audiovisual environments, she stages liminal experiences that resist reductionistic dichotomies and invite audiences into embodied, participatory encounters.

 

Suhr’s creative work has been presented nationally and internationally at major festivals, conferences, and institutions including the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), New York City Electro-Acoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), SEAMUS, Electronic Music Midwest (EMM), Society of Composers (SCI), Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC), TENOR Conference, Audio Mostly, Moxonic Festival, MANTIS Festival, Performing Media Arts Festival, New Music Gathering, Splice Festival, Beast Feast, Oh My Ear Festival, iDMAa, ACM Multimedia, as well as presentations at institutions such as Harvard University and Yale University, among many others.

 

Her work has been recognized across multiple fields including music, visual art, interactive media, and emerging technologies. Early in her career, she received a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning research grant to support research on how the rise of social media reshaped systems of evaluation and value in music and the arts. She is the author of Social Media and Music (Peter Lang) and Evaluation and Credentialing in Digital Music Communities (MIT Press), and the editor of Online Evaluation of Creative Arts (Routledge).

She is currently a Full Professor of Media and Intermedia Performance at Miami University Regionals, Ohio.