Bonnie Whiting

About Bonnie

Bonnie Whiting (she/her) performs, improvises, and creates new music for percussion. Exploring intersections of storytelling and experimental music, her work integrates text, movement, and technology. Her debut album, featuring a solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage's 45' for a speaker and 27'10.554 for a percussionist was released by Mode Records in 2017, and her second album, Perishable Structures, launched on the New Focus Recordings label in 2020. Her original music with James Falzone (clarinets) and Lisa Cay Miller (prepared piano) can be heard on Six Artifacts (Allos Documents, 2024).

Recent projects include a song cycle for speaking percussionist composed by Eliza Brown and 10 incarcerated musicians, the world premiere of Jonathan Bingham’s percussion concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, and performances on the Harry Partch instrumentarium. She is the on-stage percussionist in the multimedia opera The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist, featuring productions at Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City, The Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, and at Stanford Live. Her collaboration with multimedia artist Afroditi Psarra generated < null_abc> (Zero Moon records). Their project with designer Audrey Desjardins transcoding data from IoT devices as performance received a Mellon Creative Fellowship, lives as an interactive net art installation, and was explored in workshop at the 2020 Transmediale Festival.

She is co-Artistic Director of Seattle Modern Orchestra, and has performed with Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and red fish blue fish percussion group. She is Chair of Percussion Studies and Associate Professor of Music at the University of Washington in Seattle.