Kitty Xiao

Kitty Xiao is a composer, producer and sound artist from Naarm/Melbourne based in New York. Her work is concerned with questions that arise from the body, the experience it carries, and its role in social change. Her music involves electroacoustic works, and live sets that explore orality, movement and technology through an assemblage of instrumental gestures, sampling, custom-designed synthesisers, and collaboration.

Her music has been performed by Ensemble Modern, The Callithumpian Consort, Mivos Quartet, Dither Quartet, Ensemble Apex, Australian National Academy of Music, Switch~ Ensemble, OSSIA New Music, line upon line percussion, Transient Canvas, Syzygy Ensemble, Elysium Dance, Brighton Fashion Week, among others. Her music has been released through Move Records (Novum, 2017), Clan Analogue (Coordinate, 2017), and she was Artistic Director of the Six Piano Project in 2017. She has collaborated with artists including: Piaera Lauritz (dance), Nina Guo (voice), Hamish Jamieson (cello), David Aguila (trumpet), Brian Dooley (electric guitar), Hamish Gould (countertenor), Campbell Drummond (electronic artist), Adam Jamsek (film), Pip Elysium (dance), and Sarina Poppy (fashion). 

Xiao is a doctoral candidate in Music Composition at Columbia University, and a Teaching Assistant at the Computer Music Center. She is currently working on research that investigates timbral gesture, technologized orality, and the intersection of noise, opera and dance music. Her composition mentors include Zosha Di Castri, Georg Friedrich Haas, Brad Garton, George Lewis, Seth Cluett, David Liptak, Robert Morris and Anthony Lyons.