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Bio

Wilson Tanner Smith (FI/USA) is a composer, improviser, theatre/performance artist, and cellist whose work is rooted in a sense of Presence and a process of Reflecting: 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. His work at the edges between music and theatre often plays with the contextual/conceptual framework of being a person on stage, and draws from mundane and quotidian source materials. Works like “Wilson,” “Good Job Living!,” and “Requiem for Ducks” draw inspiration from the relationships between identity and technologies like social media, artificial intelligence, everyday gestures and phrases, DIY and found materials, and a pervasive questioning of performance as a communicative medium.

As a sought-after cellist/improviser he frequently collaborates across music, theatre, and dance, and has performed at venues such as the Deutsches SchauSpielHaus, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Estonia Kontserdisaal (Tallinn), the Ragdale Foundation (Chicago), Narva Art Center/Kreenholm Factory, Le Périscope (Lyon), and the Mullbau (Lucerne), and with artists including choreographer Ayako Kato, the Kristina Isabelle Dance Co., and Facility Theatre. Smith is a member of the Chicago-based improvising quartet Mad Myth Science, creating "spontaneous compositions and rituals for an increasingly unstable world." Their debut album was released August 2023 by Infrequent Seams (NY) to acclaim from The Wire “Below the Radar,” Quietus, and Stereogum.

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. 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. His composed music has been performed in the U.S. and Portugal by Ensemble Linea, saxophonist Brandon Quarles of ~Nois, Stephanie Wagner and Raquel Lima, and flutists in collaboration with Claire Chase; and at venues including the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre in Chicago. His flute duo, "After Thought," was published by Scherzo Editions in 2017.

In 2024 he earned a master’s in Contemporary Performance and Composition (CoPeCo), developing interdisciplinary performance work at the Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia (Tallinn), Kungliga Musikhögskolan (Stockholm), Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon, and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, with the artistic research paper Neither and Both: Presence, Ambiguity, and a Methodology for Interdisciplinary Music-Theatre. He received a B.M. in music composition with a minor in musicology from Northwestern University in 2016.

Smith has held artistic residencies at and developed projects at the Ligeti Center’s Sustainable Theater Lab (in collaboration with the Deutsches SchauSpielHaus Hamburg, Germany), the Sasso Residency (Switzerland), ActInArt (Iceland), and the Narva Art Residency (Estonia), Tryon Farms Residency (USA) and is currently based in Helsinki, Finland.