Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and media artist who makes performance works involving voice, live electronic processing, sampling technology, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures. In addition to her performance work, she has a growing body of inter-media gallery works including multi-channel sound and video installations. She has also composed and recorded scores for dance, theatre, film, and new music chamber ensembles, and she is currently composing a commissioned work for Kronos Quartet.

Z’s touring repertoire includes work that ranges in scale from concerts in galleries or small concert venues, to large-scale multi-media performance works in flexible black-box theaters and proscenium halls. Her concert repertoire includes short works for voice & electronics (with and without projected interactive video) in which she combines language, sonic textures, polyrhythmic layers, and a full range of vocal exploration. Her large-scale works involve live voice & electronics, combined with multiple channels of projected video, and set and lighting design. Z’s recent intermedia work Baggage Allowance examines attachment and the ball-and-chain-ness of dragging one’s things all over the world. She is also currently developing a new, collaborative work, Carbon Song Cycle, with video artist Christina McPhee, combining electroacoustic music performance within a multi-channel video environment, inspired, in part, by ongoing changes and upheavals in the ecosystem, and a fascination with the carbon cycle - through which carbon is exchanged between all terrestrial life forms and domains.