Whitney George: Artist at the Intersection of Music, Theater, and Immersive Experience
Omar Cody, CHASING LIGHT - December 2023, featuring the Curiosity Cabinet at Performance Space (New York)
We had the pleasure of speaking with New York–based composer, conductor, and artistic director Whitney E. George (she/her) about her creative practice and the experiences shaping her multidisciplinary work. With her site-responsive installations and concert music presented internationally, Whitney brings a unique perspective as both an ensemble director and composer exploring the spaces where sound, memory, ritual, and human behavior intersect.
Read more about Whitney’s work, artistic journey, and inspirations below.
Whitney's Bio
Whitney E. George is a New York–based artist, composer, conductor, and artistic director whose work explores the spaces where sound, memory, ritual, and human behavior intersect. She is the founder and artistic director of The Curiosity Cabinet, an ensemble and creative platform established in 2009 for experimental, interdisciplinary performance.
George’s practice moves between concert music, immersive installation, field recording, theater, and site-responsive work. Her recent projects increasingly treat sound as a physical and social material, inviting audiences to encounter familiar environments through acts of listening, surveillance, participation, and discovery. Projects such as EAVESDROPPING, AFTER DARK, HOUSE OF VOICES, and DIAL ZERO examine intimacy, anonymity, public space, and the traces people leave behind.
Her work has been presented in galleries, theaters, and unconventional spaces in New York and internationally. In 2026, George developed AFTER DARK during a residency in Taipei, creating an installation from fifteen nights of field recordings across Wanhua, with further iterations planned for Tokyo, Kyoto, Naha (Okinawa), and New York.
George holds degrees from California Institute of the Arts, Brooklyn College, and the CUNY Graduate Center. She also teaches and mentors emerging composers through Luna Lab.
A CONVERSATION WITH WHITNEY GEORGE
Tell us about your artistic journey. What brought you to where you are today?
I started as a composer, although I think I was always trying to make music be something much larger than just sound: I wanted it to have scenery, to have weather, for the performers to become characters and concert halls to become rooms where something had happened, or was about to happen.
That instinct eventually became the impetus for The Curiosity Cabinet, which I founded in 2009. The ensemble really gave me a laboratory where I could put music next to film, literature, movement, theater, objects, and light. Conducting followed partly out of necessity: if I was building these strange little worlds, someone had to keep the machinery running—and directing arrived in much the same way.
Over time, the walls of the concert hall became increasingly inconvenient; and to some extent still, they still are. So I feel like my pivot to more immersive and installation-based work felt less like a departure from composition than an expansion of it. Suddenly I could compose the room itself: where someone stands, what they overhear, how long they remain, and what happens when nothing happens.
Looking back, the trajectory seems strangely inevitable. I kept asking music to do more and more until eventually the room became part of the score. And I think that really informs a lot of my practice: considering the gestalt of it all. For me it's not just about writing music, or providing the score: it's so much more than that.
What has been one of the most meaningful or rewarding moments in your career so far?
One of the most meaningful happened very recently, with AFTER DARK in Taipei.
For fifteen nights, I walked through Wanhua making field recordings: night markets, temples, train stations, residential streets, games being played in parks, garbage trucks singing through neighborhoods, the city at two in the morning, the city beginning again before sunrise. Those recordings eventually became fifteen cassette tapes playing simultaneously in a darkened room.
There was something very moving about watching people enter that room and understand it without being told exactly how to understand it. They moved slowly. They bent down toward individual machines. They stayed. Sometimes they recognized a sound from their own neighborhood.
I spend an enormous amount of my life making highly controlled things—scores in which every rhythm, entrance, dynamic, and duration has been considered. AFTER DARK required another kind of control: creating the conditions and then letting the work breathe without me.
There is a peculiar moment when something that has existed privately inside your head suddenly becomes a place other people can enter. I don't think that feeling ever becomes ordinary.
What are you currently working on, and what excites you about it?
At the moment, I seem to be surrounded by obsolete machines.
AFTER DARK is continuing beyond its first iteration in Taipei, with new versions being developed in Japan and New York. EAVESDROPPING exists through telephones, recorded conversations, fragments of evidence, and the uncomfortable realization that listening is never entirely passive. And I’m developing DIAL ZERO, a larger installation built around a constellation of rotary telephones that ring, misbehave, remember things, and occasionally seem to know more than they should.
I’m fascinated by technologies that were designed to connect people but now feel strangely haunted: a cassette tape deteriorates every time you play it, a telephone rings and immediately creates a question. Who is there? Why are they calling? What happens if I answer? Those gestures interest me enormously.
What excites me most right now is composing situations rather than simply composing pieces. I can still use harmony, rhythm, repetition, counterpoint, silence—all of the things I have spent my life studying—but now an audience member opening a door or lifting a receiver can become part of the orchestration.
Who or what has had the greatest influence on you as an artist?
I’m not sure I could identify a single person. My influences tend to arrive as a suspicious-looking crowd.
Literature and cinema have probably shaped me as profoundly as music has. I’m drawn to work in which beauty and menace can occupy the same room without cancelling one another out—where something can be romantic, funny, grotesque, frightening, and tender almost simultaneously. I love the moment when the ordinary tilts by only a few degrees and suddenly becomes very (very) strange.
Musically, I’ve always been drawn to composers with an intensely recognizable dramatic world: Stravinsky, Corigliano, Feldman, Del Tredici, among others. But performers have been equally influential. When you work with the same musicians for many years, you stop composing for “violin” or “flute” in the abstract. You begin composing for a particular person, their instincts, their body, their sound.
Increasingly, place itself has become an influence, as has site-specificity. Cities tell you what they want if you spend enough time walking through them. Often they are most talkative after dark.
What does your creative process look like? Where do your ideas come from?
Usually an idea arrives as an image or a condition before it arrives as music, like—
—a telephone ringing in an empty room.
—fifteen cassette players all keeping slightly different time.
—a woman behind wallpaper.
—a violin being carried out of an orchestra and handed to the Devil.
Once I can see the world, I start asking what rules govern it: what is the audience allowed to know? What repeats? What disappears? What happens if someone stays longer than expected? Eventually those questions become structure, and structure becomes sound.
The practical side of my process is much less romantic. I work very regularly, usually in the morning, usually with coffee, and I make an almost comical number of diagrams, lists, drafts, maps, schedules, and backups. I like building elaborate systems in which something uncanny is permitted to occur.
I also collect constantly (read: constantly)—sounds, photographs, overheard phrases, objects, historical fragments, peculiar human behaviors. Very little is useless. Sometimes an idea sits quietly for years before I finally understand what it was asking me to make.
What has been one of the biggest challenges you've faced in your artistic career, and what did you learn from it?
One of the hardest things has been learning not to confuse rejection with judgment.
Early in my conducting life, after a conducting final, I was told that I “conduct like a girl.” It was intended as criticism. There have been quieter versions of that sentence throughout my career: assumptions about what authority should look like, what a composer should sound like, what kind of work is considered serious, and which doors one should politely stop knocking on.
And then there is ordinary artistic rejection, which is constant. Projects that eventually became extremely important to me were rejected elsewhere first. Grants I later received had been preceded by applications that went nowhere.
For a long time, I think artists are trained to interpret every “no” as a referendum on the work. It usually isn’t—sometimes it means the project needs to change, sometimes you applied at the wrong moment, sometimes five people in a room simply wanted something else.
The lesson has been persistence, but not blind persistence: to keep listening, to keep refining, and to keep changing the work when the work asks to change. But don't let someone else's locked door convince you that there isn't another entrance.
What does collaboration mean to you, and what makes a collaboration successful?
I don't think collaboration means finding people who will execute my ideas perfectly: I want collaborators to leave fingerprints.
I usually arrive with an extremely specific world in mind, but within that world I deliberately leave doors unlocked. A singer understands their own body and voice better than I ever will. A lighting designer sees darkness differently than I do. A musician who has played their instrument for twenty years will discover possibilities I could never manufacture alone.
The interesting part happens when somebody brings me something I didn't ask for and suddenly the work cannot exist without it. Trust is therefore enormous. And so is care. People make better art when they feel safe enough to take risks, when their expertise is respected, when their time is respected—and, very practically, when they have eaten something and aren't exhausted.
The best collaborations change everyone involved. If the work comes out exactly as I imagined it on the first day, I suspect we probably missed something—a very big something. A successful collaboration should contain evidence of everyone who passed through the room.
What do you hope your work contributes to the world?
Attention. And I know that may sound small, but I increasingly think attention is one of the most valuable things we can give one another.
I want to make situations that interrupt the speed at which we normally move through the world: a room becomes darker and suddenly you hear the building; a cassette player contains a street you walked down yesterday; a telephone rings and, although you know perfectly well that it is part of an artwork, some part of you still wonders whether you should answer it.
I’m interested in that threshold—when an audience stops observing and begins participating psychologically in what is happening. And I don't necessarily want to tell people what to think. I would rather change the temperature of the room slightly and see what becomes visible or tactile.
If the work contributes anything, I hope it creates spaces for curiosity, unease, tenderness, memory, and sustained listening. And I hope it makes ordinary things briefly unfamiliar. And perhaps when people leave, the real world feels a little stranger than it did when they entered.
Why do you think organizations like LunART are important in today's artistic and cultural climate? What role can they play in supporting the future of women and underrepresented artists?
I think organizations like LunART are important because the canon can sometimes appear as though it simply happened—as though certain artists naturally rose to the surface and everyone else somehow wasn't there. But of course, that isn't how history gets made. Someone chooses what gets programmed, commissioned, funded, written about, recorded, archived, taught, and ultimately remembered.
Organizations like LunART can intervene in that process while it is still happening.
And I think that goes beyond simply creating visibility for women and underrepresented artists. Visibility is important, of course, but so is infrastructure: creating actual opportunities to make ambitious work, connecting artists with collaborators and audiences, documenting what they are doing, and allowing careers to develop over time rather than offering one isolated moment of recognition.
For me, the most exciting version of that work isn't about creating a separate little room for artists who have historically been excluded. It's about making the entire house larger—and perhaps knocking through a few walls while we're at it.
Because the future of art should be stranger, broader, messier, and considerably less predictable than its past. And that only happens if many more people are given the space, resources, trust, and permission to help invent it.
QUICK TAKES
A woman artist everyone should know: Janet Cardiff. The first time I encountered her work, it rearranged something in my brain about sound, place, and what an audience could be asked to do.
Your current artistic obsession: Obsolete technology—and all the ghosts apparently living inside it.
Your creative superpower: Making an unreasonable number of disparate things somehow belong in the same room.
A work of art you never get tired of: Laddie John Dill’s Light Sentences. I love work that seems to alter the actual atmosphere of a room—and somehow makes light feel like a physical material.
One word that describes your artistic philosophy: Curiosity, of course.
Something you're looking forward to: Taking AFTER DARK to Japan and discovering what happens when the work has to learn an entirely new city.
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