Ellen Waterman

Ellen Waterman is both a music scholar and a flutist specializing in creative improvisation and contemporary music. Waterman worked closely with composer R. Murray Schafer and has published widely on his environmental music theater project “Patria”, and on acoustic ecology including the book “Sonic Geographies Imagined and Remembered” (2004).

As a member of the SHRCC-MCRI Improvisation, Community and Social Practice project, she co-founded the journal “Critical Studies in Improvisation”. Currently, Ellen is co-editing (with Gillian Siddall) a book: “Sounding the Body: Improvisation, Representation and Subjectivity”.

She has had the privilege of improvising with such great musicians as George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Miya Masaoka, Nicole Mitchell and Jesse Stewart, among others. With composer James Harley, Waterman is one half of ~spin~ duo, which creates pieces at the nexus of soundscape composition, live performance and real-time sound diffusion.

She is currently Dean of the School of Music at Memorial University of Newfoundland.