Department of Music

Anna Friz is a sound and radio artist, and media studies scholar. She specializes in multi-channel transmission systems for installation, performance, and broadcast where where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work.  She also creates dynamic, atmospheric compositions for theatre, dance, film, and solo performance equally able to reflect upon public media culture or to reveal expressive interior landscapes. Current research involves cross-disciplinary sonic practices which highlight unstable systems, open spaces to new interpretations and use, and which engage in perceptual feedback and affect between site and subject. Together with multi-media artist Konrad Korabiewski, Anna is undertaking research in Iceland, California, and Chile working with material transformations of sound and signal, in which the physical and electro-magnetic landscape of a place leaves audible traces, and in which, along with audio compositions for broadcast and installation, sculptural artifacts are produced from the process of recording and transducing sound. She also works with the Toronto-based collective Public Studio to create multi-channel film installations and sculptures which critically consider the social politics of landscape and infrastructure. 

Anna has performed and exhibited widely across North America, South America, and Europe at diverse media, sound and music festivals such as send+ receive festival, Winnipeg; The National Centre for the Arts, Ottawa; Festival TransAmeriques, Montréal; Suoni per il Popolo, Montréal; Les HTMlles, Montréal; Third Coast Audio Festival, Chicago; Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago; Fifth International Biennial of Radio, Mexico City; Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro, Valparaiso Chile; Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music, Belfast Northern Ireland; Club Transmediale, Berlin; TONSPUR, Vienna Austria; radioCONA, Ljubljana Slovenia; Art+Communication, Riga Latvia; Digitales, Brussels Belgium; Radiophonic 07, Brussels; RadiaLX, Lisbon Portugal; and many others. Her works have been commissioned by the City of Toronto (2014); Radius, Chicago (2013); Äänen Lumo Festival of New Sounds, Helsinki (2010); Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2009); Tesla, Berlin (2007); RadioRevolten, Halle Germany (2006); and the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art, Toronto (2006, 2005). Her radio art/works have been heard on the airwaves of more than 25 countries, and commissioned by national public radio in Austria, Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, and Mexico. From 2011-2013 she held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, funded by the Fonds de recherche Québec – société et culture (FRQ).

Anna sits on the board for the Wave Farm in Acra, New York, an artist-run transmission arts center with whom she has been affiliated since 2002, and a long time contributor and collaborator with ORF Kunstradio, Vienna Austria. She is a steering member of Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music, an independent artist-run organization, established in Seyðisfjörður, East Iceland. Skálar acts as both an artist collective and a mobile curatorial platform, hosting an artist residency, and producing an itinerant festival, international exchanges, and limited edition releases of audio and audio-visual works.