Leslee Smucker is a violinist, improviser, composer, and interdisciplinary artist. Her work crosses violin and viola d’amore with voice, poetry, moving image, staging, metalwork, and electronics. Much of her work deals with un-learning habits formed as a classical musician and questioning what music and art “should” be. She is drawn to in-between spaces; an artistic mode that exists on a threshold. Her current artistic practice and research engages with the process of perpetual becoming through the creation of adornments (handmade, electronic, or otherwise) for musical instruments.
Her work has been presented at Rewire Festival, Audiomanza festival, November Music, and the Center for New Music in San Francisco. Commissioned for Rewire 2023, worlds within was designed for sensory-sensitive audiences. She has been a guest composer at EMS Stockholm, and has received commission from Gaudeamus Festival. She received a 2025 Stimuleringsfonds grant for D//Am0re, a hybrid electronic resonating viola d’amore. Her album Breathing Landscape (Beacon Sound, 2024) was featured in Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music of February 2024.
Her chamber music endeavors include Murmuration Duo, Modelo62, Kali Ensemble, and Pi Quartet. She has performed violin for the soundtracks of films including The Social Dilemma and Welcome Strangers, as well as source material for electroacoustic composers including Kees Tazelaar and Hugo Lioret. She was a Barnes Fellow in Philadelphia with JACK Quartet, a fellow at Ensemble Evolution 2021 with the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Artistic Director of the chamber ensemble Green Room Artists. She performs Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura with Veniero Rizzardi including performances at Composing Spaces Festival and Area Sismica. She is committed to collaboration across and within disciplines, and to the mutual exchange of ideas and practices between artists and musicians.