Leonie Roessler

Sound/Installation Artist – Composer – Performer – Radiomaker based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Leonie captures her environment through field recordings, which she uses for radio pieces, sound installations, and compositions for soloists and ensembles. Part of her work is purely sound-based; portraits of cities for her Cultural Spaces nomad project, noise-based performances. However, the theme of marginalization with its many faces has been increasingly present in her work, especially in her art radio compositions. Related to that is also her interest in developing collaborative composition formats. She was artist in residence at New Media Society and Limited Access Festival (Iran), Forum Wallis (Switzerland), and The Story of Space Festival (India), and Berlin Circus Biennale (Germany), and Altes Finanzamt (Germany). She runs the radio branch of Studio LOOS in The Hague and is a co-producer of Iranian Music Label Noise à Noise along with Soheil Soheili. Her music has been performed/installed in Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA. Leonie’s radio works have been broadcast on all numerous stations and in art radio festivals and her compositions have been released, among others, through Antilounge, Musica Dispersa (Spain/UK), Syrphe (DE), Biodiversità (IT) and Noise á Noise (IR) and have been physically archived in the British Library. This year her installation Kalpit’s Kitchen could be heard at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, her installation piece Isfahan at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, and her nomad project Cultural Spaces at the Zwitschermaschine in Berlin - the next stop, Santiago de Chile - is in a planning stage for early 2024.

Raised in the Ruhr District (Ruhrgebiet) in Germany, Leonie relocated to Los Angeles as a teenager. She studied classical guitar at Los Angeles City College, and received a Bachelor Degree in Composition along with a Minor in Dance Performance at California State University Northridge in 2010.

She then moved to the Netherlands and earned her Master’s Degree in Composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in 2013, where she studied with Peter Adriaansz and Calliope Tsoupaki. She then completed a one-year course at the Institute of Sonology, where she focused on Field Recording and the Spatialization of Sound. In 2016 she finished the fourth and last year of the Contemporary Music Through Non-Western Techniques Program at the Conservatory of Amsterdam with Rafael Reina as her principal teacher.