Laura Ortman

Laura Ortman is a Brooklyn based composer and musician. A renowned and unique performer who brings her Apache roots to her music, Ortman’s music shines with her mastery of the violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar.

For the second night of the Winterreise Nights Festival, Ortman will present her staggering talents in a rarely seen solo recital, presented by Winterreise Curator Tanya Tagaq.

A sought-after musician at institutions around the world, Ortman has performed at America’s leading museums and musical institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art. Ortman is the founder of the Coast Orchestra, the country’s most prominent all-Native American orchestral ensemble.

Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a Brooklyn, NY composer, musician and artist. She produces solo albums, live performances and film/art soundtracks and frequently collaborates with artists in film, music, art, dance, multi-media, activistism and poetry, such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Caroline Monnet, Michelle Latimer, Raphaele Shirley and Martha Colburn.

Ortman’s notable performances include venues at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, MoMA P.S. 1, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, SF MoMA, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The Knitting Factory, CBGB’s, St. Marks Church, Dia Art Foundation, the Wave Farm, amongst countless other established and DIY venues in the US, Canada and Western Europe.

In 2008 she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed the live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film “In the Land of the Head Hunters” (1914) that premiered to sold-out audiences at the opening of the Margaret Mead Film Festival at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Of recent, Ortman is the recipient of the 2017 Jerome Foundation Fellowship, the 2016 Art Matters Grant, the 2016 Native Arts and Cultural Foundation Fellowship, the 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Resident and the 2014/15 Rauschenberg Residency.