Jessie Leov : Associate Artist
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Artist website: http://www.jessieleov.com
Jessie Leov is an award-winning composer and musician of Australian and New Zealand heritage.
Drawing on eclectic influences, Jessie's music brings together both familiar and experimental sounds. Her diverse practice as a music-maker traverses classical and popular music, including cross-disciplinary collaboration across the arts. Jessie's work reflects a deep curiosity about the world around her; exploring nature, identity, personal experience, as well as responding to other art forms such as poetry and visual art.
Jessie is the recipient of an 2022 APRA Professional Development Award and was a participant in the inaugural APRA Composition Hubs program in 2024. She was the 2024 NZSO National Youth Orchestra Composer-in-Residence, and one of four early-career composers selected to attend the 2024 Edward T. Cone Composition Institute held at Princeton University, where she was mentored by composer Steven Mackey and had an orchestral work performed by the New Jersey Symphony.
2025 brings diverse projects, including a month-long artist residency at the Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence program in Washington state, USA. Jessie will also attend the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival in Massachusetts as a composer fellow, where she will have a new chamber work performed. Closer to home, Jessie is one of four composers selected to take part in the Flinders Quartet Emerge program and will have a new work premiered by Flinders Quartet in Melbourne in November. She is also a selected composer for the 2025 NZ Composer Sessions where her work, Speculations on a Rainbow, will be recorded by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
Jessie's collaborative album, Earthworks, with sonic artist Garling Wu, will be recorded and released this year. Ruminating on the complex relationship between humans and the natural world, this project brings together their respective backgrounds in contemporary classical and electroacoustic music as well as exploring wider musical influences. Their work, "Sounding Bell", premiered in London in 2024 at an outdoor listening event curated by In the Dark Radio, and was also showcased at the MANIFEST:IO Symposium for New Media and Electronic Art in Berlin, Germany in February 2025.
Jessie holds a Master of Music in Composition from the University of Auckland, where she was awarded the Douglas Mews Composition Prize. She is an Associate Artist of the Australian Music Centre and is also represented by SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music.
Jessie Leov — current to June 2025