About
BIOGRAPHY
Merlin Coleman is a composer and multimedia artist making live performance and sound recordings, in the forms of large and small scale projects that range from a gargling chorus to an immersive sound art work about a local quarry’s environmental degradation. Her work intermingles field recordings, music composition, sound poetry, performance art, movement, film, text, theater, props and participation, often presented in surround sound settings. Due to an ongoing love affair with multichannel sound systems and the spaces they inhabit, her work is often considered in spatial terms. Melting pianos, unraveled stories, harmony-filled songs, cello, animal, environmental and machine sounds, made up languages, vocal experimentation and absurdism are throughlines in her work. Often built from real life recorded stories her unique methodology of sonic world building creates dramatic and emotional realms inside which her audiences feel they are living, for a short time.
Merlin’s work has been presented throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Kyoto and Tokyo at venues such as The Dresher Ensemble Studio, The Audium ,de Young Museum, Dance Mission, The Lab, Mills College, SoMarts, 21 Grand, and Fort Mason. She has collaborated with filmmakers, choreographers, musicians and actors including Catherine Hollander, Eric Oberthaler, Dina Emerson, Dan Cantrell, Robert Ernst, Thollen McDonas, Mary Armentrout, Nils Frykdahl, Dawn McCarthy, Elizabeth Harvey, Megan Nicely, and Maxine Moerman. Merlin has been awarded artist residencies at Chalk Hill, Engine 27, Millet Farm, Ragdale, the Audium, The Banff Centre, UCROSS and The Dresher Ensemble Studio. She holds an MFA in Composition from California Institute of the Arts.
For several years, Merlin founded and ran the Tower Residency, an artist residency on her rural property. For more than 20 years, she has cooperatively run The Milk Bar in Richmond, an artist-curated salon series at the intersection of innovative, contemporary and experimental artistic genres. She has produced two full length recordings and is on multiple compilations.
Her evening length work, EXPLORATIONS of EXTRACTION and DECAY, premiered at The Audium in San Francisco in 2023 and continues to run there intermittently. Her newest work DISPATCHES from the CHARCOAL FOREST is a 40 minute choreographed song Cycle for Six singers and quadraphonic soundscape performed in the round based on Stories of Fire, it premiered at the Dresher Ensemble Studio in Oakland, CA in 2026.
Merlin lives in northern California with her two children.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a multimedia artist making performances, recordings, large and small scale site specific projects and productions. I have been deeply influenced by performance art since my Dad snuck me into a Laurie Anderson show when I was ten. I intermingle field recordings, music composition, sound poetry, performance art, movement, film, text, theater, props and participation. Melting pianos, unraveled stories, harmony-filled songs, animal and environmental sounds, made up languages, vocal experimentation and absurdism are through lines layered in my work.
My instinctual impulse is to address environmental and social consciousness and health. Some themes include environmental degradation, refurbishing fairytales to unpack western cultural icons and narratives, and utilizing participation to create bold communal experiments and shared experience.
I have had an ongoing love affair with multichannel sound systems and the spaces they inhabit and often think of my work in spacial terms. At the core, lives the creation of dramatic and emotional worlds where an audience member can feel they are living, for a short time directly inside of the worlds created.
instagram: @merlincolemann
