Leonie Roessler

Sound/Installation Artist – Composer – Performer – Radiomaker based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Leonie captures her environment through field recordings, which she uses for radio pieces, sound installations, and compositions for soloists and ensembles. Part of her work is purely sound-based; portraits of cities for her Cultural Spaces nomad project, noise-based performances. However, the theme of marginalization with its many faces has been increasingly present in her work, especially in her art radio compositions. Related to that is also her interest in developing collaborative composition formats. She co-manages Iranian Music Label Noise à Noise along with Soheil Soheili and runs the radio branch of Studio LOOS in The Hague. Margherita Brillada and Leonie are organizing On Air - On Site, a yearly art radio festival which explores the boundaries of being simultaneously on air in a physical and virtual space, challenging different radio formats. They just received the Stimuleringsfond for digital culture to create a radio platform which promotes experimentation and inclusion.

Leonie’s music has been performed/installed in Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA. Leonie’s radio works have been broadcast on numerous stations and in art radio festivals, and her compositions have been released, among others, through Antilounge, Musica Dispersa (Spain/UK), Syrphe (DE), Biodiversità (IT) and Noise á Noise (IR) and have been physically archived in the British Library. Pieces of Cultural Spaces could be heard at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Limited Access Festival in Tehran, Motorkhooneh in Shiraz, The Story of Space Festival in Goa, and Zwitschermaschine in Berlin. Her field recordings of Iran found a place in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s performances of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Play “English”, performed between May and July 2024 in Stratford-Upon-Avon and at the Kiln Theater in London. The next stop for Cultural Spaces will be the Museo del Sonido in Santiago de Chile, where an installation of the portraits of Iran, India, The Hague and Berlin will run for the entire summer season.

Raised in the Ruhr District (Ruhrgebiet) in Germany, Leonie relocated to Los Angeles as a teenager. She studied classical guitar at Los Angeles City College, and received a Bachelor Degree in Composition along with a Minor in Dance Performance at California State University Northridge in 2010.

She then moved to the Netherlands and earned her Master’s Degree in Composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in 2013, where she studied with Peter Adriaansz and Calliope Tsoupaki. She then completed a one-year course at the Institute of Sonology, where she focused on Field Recording and the Spatialization of Sound. In 2016 she finished the fourth and last year of the Contemporary Music Through Non-Western Techniques Program at the Conservatory of Amsterdam with Rafael Reina as her principal teacher.