Cecilia Suhr is an award-winning intermedia composer-performer whose work integrates multi-instrumental performance, electroacoustic composition, live electronics, and AI-assisted improvisation into immersive audiovisual environments. Conceived as a One-Body Orchestra, her latest project unites violin, cello, piano, Korean bamboo flute, and soprano voice within a single embodied practice that challenges conventional assumptions about the expressive limits of an individual performer. Through years of cultivating multiple instrumental and vocal disciplines, she develops the body itself as an evolving artistic medium—a technology of the self capable of sustaining orchestral complexity through human performance. Within this framework, SoMax 2 functions as an improvisational partner that listens and responds in real time using musical corpora composed, performed, and recorded by the artist herself. Rather than replacing human creativity, AI serves as a catalyst that amplifies the performer's agency, extending the possibilities of human musicianship while keeping the body and its expressive decisions at the center of the work.

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Suhr's work investigates how technological systems reshape human experience, asking how emerging forms of intelligence alter perception, embodiment, memory, identity, and relationships. Rather than treating AI as either utopian or dystopian, she approaches it as a site of critical artistic inquiry—one that reveals both new creative possibilities and the tensions that arise when human agency is shared with computational systems. Her performances explore these questions through improvisation, live electronics, and embodied interaction, using artistic practice as a means of examining what it means to remain deeply human within increasingly intelligent technological environments.

Her work has been presented nationally and internationally at ICMC, NYCEMF, SEAMUS, New Music on the Bayou, ACMC, TENOR, SCI, CMS/ATMI, the MANTIS Festival, the Oh My Ears Festival, New Music Gathering, the Performing Media Festival, the Napoleon Electronic Media Festival, the Splice Festival, the MoXonic Festival, the 22nd Biennial Festival of New Music, and the Mise-En Festival, among others.

Before pivoting to interactive audiovisual performance, Suhr developed a diverse visual language through a focused and prolific chapter of painting, digital art, video art, drawing, and augmented reality art. Comprising five international and national solo exhibitions and over 60 group exhibitions worldwide, this visual expertise remains central to her current practice, where she sometimes integrates her original, reprocessed digital art with AI-mediated visuals. 

Suhr has received international recognition across composition, performance, multimedia, visual art, and interdisciplinary scholarship. Recent honors include Finalist Honors at the 4th Petrichor International Music Competition (2025), Bronze Medals from the Global Music Awards (2025, 2022), the Silver Medal at the International Cambridge Music Competition (2023), Second Prize in Violin Performance and Original Composition at the American International Music Competition (2023), Honorable Mention in Virtual Performance from The American Prize (2023), and the Best of Competition Award in Interactive Multimedia from the Broadcast Education Association (2023). Her work was also recognized with the Pauline Oliveros Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2022), Faculty Achievement in Scholarship and Artistic Distinction at Miami University (2021), and awards in visual and fine arts including Honorable Mention in Mixed Media at the New York City International Fine Art Contest, the People’s Choice Award at Pop Revolution Gallery, the Saint Michael Special Achievement Medal at NY Realism, and the Special Recognition Award in Digital Art from Light Space & Time.
As a scholar, Suhr’s research has additionally been recognized through the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Research Grant Award (2012).
 
She is the author of "Social Media and Music: The Digital Field of Cultural Production" (Peter Lang) and "Evaluation and Credentialing in Digital Music Communities" (MIT Press), and editor of "Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts" (Routledge).
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She currently serves as Full Professor of Media Studies and Intermedia Performance at Miami University Regionals.