Biography
Described by the New York Times as “mesmerizing” and by KoreAm Journal as “totally unique.. ..expect the unexpected,” Korean-American composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Bora Yoon is an interdisciplinary artist who conjures audiovisual soundscapes using digital devices, voice and found objects and instruments from a variety of cultures and historical centuries – to formulate an audiovisual storytelling through music, movement and sound.
In recent projects, Yoon composed and performed the live score to Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle directed by Stephen Earnhart (Edinburgh International Festival, Singapore Arts Festival) commissioned by Asia Society, and wrote and performed a two-person opera Sunken Cathedral (produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE Art Center) featuring Korean traditional dance and drumming artist Vong Pak. As an improvisor and performer/composer, she also collaborates with multimedia artist R. Luke DuBois (bitforms Gallery), with ( (( PHONATION )) ), and ever-evolving experiments with technology and art.
From site-specific works to music for dance, theater, multimedia happenings, and art galleries, Yoon’s work resonates with an enormously diverse range of genres, communities, and collaborators including poet Sekou Sundiata (The 51st (dream) state), Iceland-based electronic producer Ben Frost, visual artist Ann Hamilton (event of a thread), choreographers Yin Mei Dance and Noémie Lafrance, early music quartet New York Polyphony, video artist Adam Larsen, filmmaker H. Paul Moon, composer Michael Gordon (Lightning at Our Feet), SYMPHO directed by Paul Haas, DJ Spooky, guitarist Kaki King, live visualist Joshue Ott, the League of Electronic Musicians and Urban Robots, phonograph artist Aleks Kolkowski, Korean traditional dance and drumming artist Vong Pak, kinetic sculptor U-Ram Choe, and data visualist R. Luke DuBois, among many others. Yoon has been commissioned to write new works for Metropolis Ensemble, Musica Viva, Young People’s Chorus of New York, Sō Percussion and the SAYAKA chorale of Tokyo. Recordings are available through INNOVA Recordings, Popular Noise, Swirl Records, MIT Press, iTunes, (gr)Albums, and Naxos — and select scores through Boosey & Hawkes Publishing.
Yoon’s music has been presented at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Singapore Arts Festival, the Nam Jun Paik Museum (South Korea), MADE Festival (Sweden), Festival of World Cultures (Poland), Park Avenue Armory, and Walker Art Center, among others. She is a TED2014 fellow, 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in Music/Sound, United Artists fellow with the Asian American Arts Alliance, has been an artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory, Ringling Museum, the Hermitage, HERE Art Center/PROTOTYPE, and with the Sorel Organization — and is a doctoral candidate in Music Composition and the Interdisciplinary Humanities (IHUM) at Princeton University.
Classically trained and steeped in a first love of choral music, Yoon is fascinated by the intersection of space and sound, maps, human Venn diagrams, handsome-sounding kitchenware, sonorities, and the pulleys and strings that hold everything together.