Marina Rosenfeld

Marina Rosenfeld is an Adjunct Professor of Sonic Arts at the Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College, where she has been faculty since 2005 and has co-chaired the Music/Sound department since 2007. Based in New York, she is a composer and artist whose interdisciplinary work spans sound art, performance, and visual art, with presentations at major institutions including the Park Avenue Armory, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, and Stedelijk Museum.

• Adjunct Professor, Sonic Arts, Conservatory of Music, School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts
• Faculty member, Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College since 2005
• Co-chair, Department of Music/Sound since 2007
• 2024 Alpert Award in Visual Art recipient

Rosenfeld's research interests center on the social and perceptual dimensions of sound, exploring how sonic experiences transform through bodily engagement and spatial contexts. Her work interrogates the shape and sociality of perception, examining how sensual experiences become hearing, sight, and touch. She creates installations that embrace traces, after-sound, distortion, and the body as an amalgam of social, libidinal, and inherited possibilities. Her practice spans performance, installation, electronic media, experimental musical notation, sculpture, photography, and improvisation, with a focus on inventing new forms that challenge existing categories and engage critically with power structures.

Her recent publications and critical reception reveal a strong focus on the material conditions of sound, with particular attention to the Deathstar series, Teenage Lontano, and The Sheer Frost Orchestra. Critics examine her work through lenses of object-oriented ontology, neoliberal critique, and the politics of sound in institutional spaces. Her approach to sound as both material and social practice has generated significant scholarly interest in how sonic experiences shape and are shaped by cultural contexts.

• Alpert Award in Visual Art (2024)
• Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2011)
• New York Foundation for the Arts Composer Fellowship (2004)
• Watermill Foundation Inga Maren Otto Fellowship (2019)
• Harvestworks Van Lier Fellowship (2002)
• EMPAC Artist Residency and Commission (2024)

Rosenfeld has advised numerous artists through her teaching at Bard College and has received multiple grants supporting her artistic research, including commissions from Ensemble MusikFabrik (2017) and Ensemble Contrechamps (2022). Her collaborative practice spans decades, working with choreographers like Merce Cunningham (2004-08), Ralph Lemon (2014-15), and Maria Hassabi (2016-17), as well as musicians including Christian Marclay and Warrior Queen. She has also been commissioned by major festivals including Donaueschingen Musiktage and documenta 14.

Rosenfeld's most enduring project is The Sheer Frost Orchestra, a temporary all-female amateur ensemble she founded in 1993 that continues to be performed today. This project explores power dynamics through unconventional instrumentation, with performers using nail polish bottles to tap electric guitars lying on the ground. Her Deathstar series represents another significant body of work, with installations and performances evolving since 2017, including a 48-hour performance in Switzerland in 2023 where audience members slept, woke, ate, and listened together over an extended period.