Laura Ortman
Music Residency

A soloist musician, artist, composer, and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, filmic and artistic soundtracks. Ortman has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Okkyung Lee, Caroline Monnet, Jeffery Gibson, Tanya Lukin Linklater, New Red Order, Susan Alcorn, Loren Connors, among others. An inquisitive and exquisite amplified violinist, she is also versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and often sings through a megaphone and is a producer of capacious field recordings.

She has performed at the Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim, and MOMA, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Socrates Sculpture Park, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Dia Foundation, and CBGB's in New York, La Biennale di Venezia 2024 in Italy, Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as countless established and DIY venues and festivals across North America and Europe. In 2008, she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Indigenous orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’ In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Indigenous cast. The Coast Orchestra premiered at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Ortman has lived in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn since 1997.