Portfolio (pdf)

1-page CV (pdf)

Longform CV (pdf)

Bio

Wilson Tanner Smith (FI/USA) is a cellist, composer, improviser, and theatre artist whose work at the edges between music and theatre is rooted in mirroring the alienating, absurd, silly or senseless signals we receive from the world around us, in order to cultivate an awareness of the relationships we have with the people, systems, and structures we live with. Works like “Good Job Living!” and “’We have gathered here today’” have drawn inspiration from the presentation of identity in daily life, alienation in commercial/consumer culture, and our relationships with social media, artificial intelligence, and Big Data. He often uses DIY and found materials and a playful relationship with the fourth wall to offer a pervasive questioning of performance as a communicative medium.

His most recent large scale interdisciplinary work, “Super normal things” was premiered at the Deutsches SchauSpeilHaus (Hamburg) and TD Berlin’s MonologFest, created in collaboration with New Delhi-based playwright Gaurav Singh Nijjer—a multimedia hybrid live/remote performance about the lived emotional experience of a world in seemingly-perpetual, overlapping, and increasing crisis.

As a sought-after composer/improviser he frequently collaborates across music, theatre, dance, and multimedia creation, with a musical sensibility informed by free improvisation, free jazz, and deep listening, and by many cross-cultural/-genre collaborations in diverse musical communities in Chicago and across northern/western Europe.

He has performed as musician, actor, and/or dancer at venues including the German National Theatre/Deutsches SchauSpielHaus (Hamburg), MonologFest/TD Berlin, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Estonia Kontserdisaal (Tallinn), the Ragdale Foundation (Chicago), Kreenholm Factory/Narva Art Center, Victory Gardens Theatre (Chicago), Le Périscope (Lyon), and the Mullbau (Lucerne), and with artists including choreographer Ayako Kato, the Kristina Isabelle Dance Co., and Facility Theatre. His compositions have been performed by Ensemble Linea, ~Nois, Facility Theatre, and flutists in collaboration with Claire Chase. Smith is also a member of the Chicago-based improvising quartet Mad Myth Science, whose debut album was released August 2023 to acclaim from The Wire, Quietus, and Stereogum. His soundtrack and scoring work can be heard in short films and the anticipated indie video game Unemployment Simulator 2018 (Samuel Lehikoinen/TurboLento games, 2026).

An occasional dance-theatre artist, Smith’s movement background is grounded in aikidoistic movement, as developed through formal study under his late father, dancer and sensei Henry Smith, Shihan during childhood (see “Writing” tab for more). This basis is informed more recently by the anatomical movement work of Ayako Kato and somatic dance-improvisation workshops in Estonia and Sweden. In February 2018 he performed as a dancer and cellist in the world premiere of Ayako Kato's “Stück 1998 / Anchor 2018” (including the world premiere of pages 879-908 of Manfred Werder's “Stück 1998”), a one-time-only movement and music work spanning 4 unique nights of performance at Links Hall, Chicago.

He earned a Master’s in Contemporary Performance and Composition in 2024 from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, developing multimedia music-theatre work and artistic research at EMTA (Tallinn), at the Kungliga Musikhögskolan (Stockholm), the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon, and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, with the research paper “Neither and Both: Presence, Ambiguity, and a Manifesto for Interdisciplinary Performance-Making”; he holds a Bachelor of Music in music composition with a minor in musicology from Northwestern University (2016).

Smith has held artistic residencies at and developed projects at the Ligeti Center’s Sustainable Theatre Lab in collaboration with the Deutsches SchauSpielHaus (Hamburg), Pavillon K (Denmark) the Sasso Residency (Switzerland), Ung Nordisk Musik (Finland), ActInArt (Iceland), and the Narva Art Residency (Estonia), and is currently based in Helsinki, Finland, where he hosts the monthly concert series Something Else on the fourth Thursday of every month at Musta Kissa Bar in Kallio,