Laura Ortman

A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman creates across multiple platforms, including albums, performances, and artistic soundtracks. Collaborators include Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Kronos Quartet, New Red Order, and Martin Bisi. An inquisitive and exquisite amplified violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, and sings through a megaphone. Ortman has performed at Whitney Museum, Guggenheim, Venice Biennale, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, National Museum of the American Indian, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film Festival, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Indigenous orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Indigenous cast.