Leonie Roessler

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

Leonie captures her environment through field recordings, which she uses for radio pieces, sound installations, compositions for soloists and ensembles, and for her own live performances. 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. Leonie is active as a performer and improviser, blending field recordings, various guitars, and electronics processes. She appears with Hessel Veldman as Zuiling.

She co-founded Music Label aNoise along with Soheil Soheili and is part of LOOS in The Hague, which is under the direction of Peter van Bergen. Margherita Brillada and Leonie are organize On Air - On Site, a yearly art radio festival of 48 hours which explores the boundaries of being simultaneously on air in a physical and virtual space, challenging different radio formats, which is generously supported by the Konrad Boehmer Foundation and held in partnership with the Institute of Sonology and West Den Haag. In addition, Margherita and Leonie are running BUG Radio, a growing community radio program that hosts regular shows by international sound artists and also engages in social outreach projects. BUG Radio is made possible by the Stimuleeringsfond Creative Industry, Cultuurschakel, and the Gemeente Den Haag.

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. Her 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 aNoise (IR/DE) 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. The last stop of this project was the Museo del Sonido in Santiago, Chile, where it was featured as a solo exhibit for the entire summer season. 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.

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 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. Afterwards she 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. Leonie teaches composition, classical piano, and classical guitar for Vivaldi Muziek in Den Haag and has taught composition and field recording workshops for The Story of Space Festival, Limited Access, and at the Islamic Azad University of Fine Arts, among other places.