Sarah Hennies

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music

Primary Academic Program: Music

Biography: Sarah Hennies is a percussionist and composer whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues, including queer and trans identity, love, intimacy, and psychoacoustics. Although primarily a composer of solo and chamber works, she is also active in improvisation, film, performance art, and dance. As a composer, she has received commissions from, among other performers and ensembles, Bearthoven (New York), Cristián Alvear (Santiago), Living Earth Show (San Francisco), Yarn/Wire (New York), and Thin Edge New Music Collective (Toronto). She has presented her work nationally and internationally, as both a composer and percussionist, at Le Guess Who? (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), O’Art Space (Milan), Café Oto (London), Alice (Copenhagen), Edition Festival (Stockholm), and ISSUE Project Room (New York), where in 2017 she premiered the widely acclaimed Contralto, a film and sound work that features a cast of transgender women accompanied by a live score for string quartet and three percussionists. Contralto has since been performed and screened at venues and festivals including Bent Frequency (Atlanta), La Sobilla (Verona), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), and Time-Based Art Festival (Portland, Oregon). Hennies is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and additional support from New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, New York. She is the founder of the Weighter Recordings record label, which releases works by artists at the fringes of contemporary music, and a member of the improvised music trio Meridian, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group.

BA, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; MA, University of California, San Diego. At Bard since 2019.
Website: https://www.sarah-hennies.com/
Email:
Location: Edith C. Blum Institute
Office: N107