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200-words Bio

Cecilia Suhr is an award-winning intermedia artist, multimedia composer, and performer developing a contemporary operatic form conceived as a "One-Body Orchestra." Driven by a singular intuitive vision and multi-instrumental proficiency across violin, cello, piano, bamboo flute, and soprano voice, she constructs immersive audiovisual environments through live electronic processing and visuals. Her work collapses disciplinary boundaries into integrated systems where sound, image, and human presence are generated simultaneously in one continuous, improvisational act.

While her established practice explores the synergy of live performance and technology, Suhr’s current work functions as a critical inquiry into how emerging AI reshapes affect, identity, and culture. This evolving research-driven artistry investigates social and psychological disruptions through embodied, electro-acoustic human-machine relations, offering a visceral perspective on how perception and relationality are transformed under mediated conditions.

Her work has received international recognition across multimedia composition, fine arts, and scholarship, including the Pauline Oliveros Prize, BEA Best of Competition Award, and the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Award. She has presented at international festivals, conferences, biennials, and exhibitions within new music, electro-acoustic, and visual art contexts. She is a Full Professor of Media Studies and Intermedia Performance at Miami University Regionals.

 

Long Bio

Cecilia Suhr is an intermedia artist, multi-instrumentalist, and scholar whose practice spans music improvisation, visual art, live performance, and critical inquiry into the human condition in the digital age. Her work creates immersive, time-based experiences that fuse sound, image, and embodied gesture into encounters of intellectual and emotional depth.

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At the heart of Suhr's practice is a sustained and nuanced engagement with one of the defining questions of our time: how human consciousness, affect, and social life are transformed by technological change. Rather than offering simple answers, her work inhabits the most generative tensions — between intuition and computation, vulnerability and automation, presence and mediation — producing performances and installations that are as philosophically rigorous as they are viscerally immediate. Her selective, critically informed engagement with emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, positions her as both practitioner and thinker at the intersection of art, technology, and human experience.

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A performer on violin, cello, piano, bamboo flute, and soprano voice, Suhr brings to the stage an improvisational sensibility shaped by deep fluency, sensitivity, and virtuosic intensity. Her live audiovisual performances — in which sound, image, electronics, and embodied presence dissolve into unified experiential wholes — are not merely concerts or exhibitions, but liminal encounters that invite audiences into a recalibrated awareness of themselves, each other, and the increasingly mediated world they inhabit.

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Her work has been presented at venues and festivals such as the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the New York City Electro-Acoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), SEAMUS, the New Music on the Bayou Festival, the Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC), the TENOR Conference, SCI (Society of Composers), Audio Mostly, the MANTIS Festival, the Performing Media Festival, the Splice Festival, and the Moxonic Festival, the 22nd biennial Festival of New Music, and Mise En Festival, among many others.

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Suhr's work has been recognized across music, visual art, interactive media, and emerging technologies. In music and performance, her honors include the Pauline Oliveros Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2022); Bronze Medal awards from the Global Music Awards (2022, 2025) in the contemporary classical and electro-acoustic/experimental genres; a Silver Medal from the International Cambridge Music Competition (2023) for original composition and solo violin improvisation; Second Prize in Violin Performance and Original Composition from the American International Music Competition in Cleveland (2023); an Honorable Mention in the Virtual Performance category from The American Prize (2023); and a Finalist Honor at the Petrichor International Music Competition (2025) in the Electronic or Multidisciplinary Work category.

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Her interdisciplinary and media work has been equally recognized. She received the Best of Competition award in Interactive Multimedia from the Broadcast Education Association's Festival of Media Arts (2023). She was also selected for the Asia Culture Center International Residency in Gwangju, Korea (2022), with full grant support, though she was ultimately unable to accept the residency.

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Her visual art has been recognized through invited solo and juried exhibitions. Honors include an Honorable Mention in the Mixed Media category at the New York City International Fine Art Contest (2016), the People’s Choice Award at Pop Revolution Gallery (2015), the Saint Michael Special Achievement Medal at NY Realism (2013), and a Special Recognition Award from the International Abstracts Art Competition at Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery (2012).

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As a researcher, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Research Grant (2012), supporting research on how social media reshapes systems of evaluation and value in music and the arts. Suhr is the author of "Social Media and Music: The Field of Cultural Productions"  (Peter Lang) and "Evaluation and Credentialing in Digital Music Communities" (MIT Press), and the editor and contributing author of "Online Evaluation of Creative Arts" (Routledge) — a body of work that has helped shape the intellectual landscape of digital music studies and online creative culture.

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Suhr holds a Master's degree in Media Ecology from New York University, a PhD in Media Studies from Rutgers University, and a Certificate of Completion in Audiovisual Practice from CCRMA at Stanford University.

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