Short Bio:

Cecilia Suhr is an award-winning intermedia composer-performer, media theorist, researcher, and multi-instrumentalist whose work investigates computational embodiment—the changing possibilities of human bodily presence, agency, memory, and identity as the performing body becomes entangled with computation and AI. Working across violin, cello, voice, piano, Korean bamboo flute, electroacoustic composition, interactive media, and audiovisual performance, she uses her own performing body as a site of artistic and theoretical inquiry. Her accolades include the Pauline Oliveros Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music, a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Research Grant Award, an Honorable Mention from The American Prize, and medals from the Cambridge Music Competition and Global Music Awards, among others. Her music and intermedia work have been presented internationally at festivals and conferences including ICMC, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, Mise-En Music Festival, New Music on the Bayou, Performing Media Art Festival, Hot Air Music Festival, Splice Festival, MANTIS Festival, TENOR, EMM, SCI, BEAST Feast, and MoXsonic. She is the author of Social Media and Music: The Digital Field of Cultural Production (Peter Lang, 2012) and Evaluation and Credentialing in Digital Music Communities (MIT Press, 2014). She is currently Full Professor of Media Studies and Intermedia Performance at Miami University Regionals.

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Long Bio:

Cecilia Suhr is an award-winning intermedia composer-performer, media theorist, researcher, and multi-instrumentalist whose artistic and scholarly practice investigates computational embodiment: how human bodily presence, agency, memory, and identity are transformed as the performing body becomes increasingly entangled with computational and artificial intelligence systems. Situated at the intersection of media theory, music, performance, and visual art, her work asks a fundamental question: What can a human body become through computation? Rather than approaching technology simply as a tool controlled by the performer, Suhr examines how computation can enable new modes of embodied existence—allowing the performing body and its traces to multiply, persist, transform, and enter into increasingly complex relationships with computational systems.

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This inquiry is central to Suhr’s evolving One-Body Orchestra, an intermedia performance practice integrating violin, cello, piano, Korean bamboo flute, soprano voice, electroacoustic composition, live electronics, gesture-controlled sound and image, and AI-assisted improvisation. Through years of cultivating multiple instrumental and vocal disciplines, Suhr treats her own body not simply as the performer of the work but as a site of practice-based research. Physical gesture can generate and transform sound and visual bodies; performed actions can persist as computational memory; and a singular biological performer can encounter multiplied and transformed versions of her own embodied presence. In this framework, the “orchestra” extends beyond the collection of instruments to encompass the multiplied relationships among physical body, sound, image, memory, and machine.

AI-assisted improvisation further complicates these relationships. Using systems such as SoMax 2, Suhr improvises with a computational partner that listens and responds in real time using musical corpora composed, performed, and recorded by the artist herself. Her work is therefore concerned not simply with what AI can generate, but with how human agency changes when memory, response, and improvisational decision-making become distributed across human and computational participants. Rather than framing AI as either utopian or dystopian, Suhr approaches human–AI interaction as a critical artistic and philosophical inquiry into emerging forms of embodiment, authorship, agency, and creative coexistence. This practice grows from Suhr’s longstanding research into the relationship between humans, media, and technological systems. Her earlier scholarship examined how digital networks reshape cultural production, creativity, evaluation, identity, and social relationships. Her current practice-based research brings these questions directly into the performing body, using composition, improvisation, interactive systems, and audiovisual performance as modes of theoretical investigation. Through this convergence of media theory and artistic practice, she explores the body not as a fixed biological boundary but as an evolving site through which human and computational forms of presence continually encounter and reconfigure one another.

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Suhr’s 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 her current focus on interactive audiovisual performance, Suhr developed an extensive visual practice encompassing painting, digital art, video art, drawing, and augmented reality. Her visual work has been presented in five solo exhibitions and more than 60 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. This visual practice remains integral to her intermedia work, where moving image, computational transformation, and her own reprocessed digital imagery function alongside sound and physical performance rather than as secondary accompaniment.

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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, her research has additionally been recognized through a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Research Grant Award (2012).

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Suhr 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). She currently serves as Full Professor of Media Studies and Intermedia Performance at Miami University Regionals.