Bio
Akiko Hatakeyama is an award-winning composer/performer of electroacoustic music and intermedia. She explores the boundaries between written music, improvisation, electronics, real-time computer-based interactivity, and visual media. Storytelling, memories, and nature play an important role in Akiko’s work, and she most often finds beauty in simplicity. Akiko’s research focuses on realizing her ideas of relations between the body and mind into intermedia composition, often in conjunction with building customized instruments/interfaces. It is a form of nonverbal communication with her inner self and with the environment, including the audience. By somatically actuating perceptions with sound, light, and haptic objects, her ideas of relations between the body and mind become embraceable. Her exploration in embodying time – in the form of memories, emotions, and personal experiences – is realized. As a result, the exploration brings therapeutic effects. Sharing this special experience, only achievable by creating and performing music, is an important part of Akiko’s research and teaching.
Her work has been presented internationally at various venues and festivals in the U.S.A., Canada, Chile, England, Ireland, Portugal, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, and Japan. Selected awards include the Best Performance Award at the NIME International Conference, the winner of the Audio-Visual Composition at the ICMA Showcase: Asia, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, and the MacDowell Fellowship.
Akiko obtained her B.A. in music from Mills College and M.A. in Experimental Music/Composition at Wesleyan University and completing her Ph.D. at the MEME program at Brown University. Her instructors include Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, Ronald Kuivila, Maggi Payne, Chris Brown, John Bischoff, Jim Moses, Todd Winkler, and Butch Rovan. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Oregon.