Welcome! 

I am a pianist, composer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, producer, and experimental instrument creator whose work investigates social and environmental issues through dynamic sonic experiences.

​Freely blending diverse disciplines and media, my work is deeply rooted in inquiry and intention, foundational social relevance, and multi-sensory shared experience, resulting in passionately crafted, boldly innovative, memorable cultural happenings and artifacts.   
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Promo Reel

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Interested in commissions, collaborations, or sponsorship?   
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Contact me at jenniferawright(at)yahoo.com to inquire about about performances, educational outreach, workshops, lectures, creative retreats, promotional projects, event enhancement, sonic art installations, and more!

​Upcoming Projects & Performances

NATURE STUDIES
February 28, 2026 from 11:30 am - 1:30 pm

CURB Gallery
424 NW 12th Avenue, Portland, OR
Free!

This art show features elegant sensual imagery by artists Alex H and Manda Beckett - imagine fluid line drawings reminiscent of early Picasso and entwined silhouettes a la Matisse.

As guest artist for the show's closing event Feb. 28th, I'll be premiering a brand new musical performance art piece exploring intimacy, connection, and vulnerability through loops: specifically, looped a cappella vocals and an interactive gown made from countless loops of velvet rope that I designed and assembled by hand.

The event will also feature readings by the artists and community members. 
(Note: due to the intimate nature of some of the artwork, this exhibit may not be appropriate for young viewers.)
Exciting news!

I'm delighted to announce that I have been awarded a   

MusicOregon Echo Fund grant  
to produce my first album of original music!!!

​More details to come as this project develops!

Guest Performance Artist, Every Woman Biennial
 March 28th, 2026
New York, NY
​
I'm delighted to have been selected to present my performance art piece "The Mad Libbers' Tea Party"
​for spoken word, two toy pianos, and full tea set (including cake) 
​with guest pianist Kathleen Supové!
​THE FEMALE GAZE: Women and Allies Unite in Petrifying the Patriarchy
with Kathleen Supové
April 11, 2026 @ 7 pm @ Lincoln Hall, Rm. 75
Portland State University, Portland, OR

Join in the cathartic fun as we give the patriarchy a proper smashing!  New music by Jennifer Wright, Bonnie Miksch, Randy Woolf, Kathleen Supové, Beata Moon, and Jerome Kitzke create the soundtrack we've all been needing (menfolk included).  It will bolster your resolve for positive change, reinvigorate your faith in humanity, and make room for solidly satisfying ranting!

I'm delighted to announce that this project was awarded a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC)!
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I'm super excited to announce that I was awarded a
2026 Portland Area Theater Alliance (PATA) "GROW" grant  
to produce my audience-interactive performance art piece "Taking Liberties"
as part of the 2026 Fertile Ground Festival of New Works in Portland, OR
​with guest pianist Kathleen Supové!

In these premiere showings of my newest performance art piece, the audience will determine the course of events. As two pianists play an extended duet, the audience is invited to interact with them in specific ways. What will be revealed as this sonic social experiment unfolds?

Each performance will be presented in a different way!
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Performance dates:
Tuesday, April 14 @ 7:30 pm
Friday, April 17 @ 10 pm ("late night"-themed)
Sunday, April 19 @ 5:30 pm (family-friendly)

​Extradition Spring Concert: Music 1960
April 18, 2026 @ Leaven Community, N. Portland, OR

I am delighted to join forces with the fearless Extradition team for this performance of 
​Terry Riley's Concert for Two Pianists and Tape Recorders (1959–60)!
Even more exciting news!!

I'm delighted to announce that I have been awarded a  ​​
Building 5 month-long residency & Dengerink Creative Stipend
to produce work and public engagements for "Mark/Meaning" with Carla Mann.

Watch this space for more info about the public engagements, workshops, and performances we'll be presenting throughout our October 2026 residency.​

​Recent Performances


​ECHOLOCATIONS:  
Sound machines & interactive installations seeking sense in a nonsensical world

Solo art instrument show
PLACE Galeria, 735 NW 18th Ave. Portland, OR
December 4, 2025 - January 17, 2026
First Thursday Opening Party: Thursday, December 4, 2025 5-7 pm

Two concerts: 
Fri. 1.16.2026 @ 7pm (6-7pm open gallery hour before the show)
Sat. 1.17.2026 @ 7pm (6-7pm open gallery hour before the show)
 
The first retrospective exhibition and concert series to feature my art instruments and sound sculptures!

​More details on the Echolocations page HERE.
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​LONG STRINGS at Zidell Yards (Portland, OR)
​2 public shows: Friday, July 18, 2025 @ 5 and 7:30 pm
private showing: Saturday, July 19th @ 7:30 pm

This once-in-a-lifetime concert event featured my newest (and by far my biggest!) musical creation: ARACHNE, the world's largest steel-cable LONGS STRINGS INSTRUMENT, comprised of 7 massive tuned strings over 160 feet long!

Joining this creature were two other sets of (somewhat shorter!) Long Strings and several of the experimental instruments and sound machines that I have built at Zidell Shipyards from over 3000 lbs. of metal industrial debris!
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I was joined by distinguished artists Paul Safar (medieval hurdy gurdy), Lucas Marshall Smith (spoken word and voice), and Diane Chaplin (cello).

More info HERE 

I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded a Portland Arts Project grant ​from the 
Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) 
AND
a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission (OAC) to support LONG STRINGS! 

Huge thanks to community event sponsors Zidell Yards and Toast!
Guest Artist
SubSuperior Music and Art Experience Festival, Duluth, MN
July 28 - August 3, 2025

SubSuperior Music and Art Experience is a series of sub- and super-aqueous art happenings that take place on and in Lake Superior.  I will be spending a wonderful week immersed (pun intended!) in inventing and developing various aquatic sound experiments, activations, and performances, some of them on the floating HEXAS platforms pictured above.  


​THE FEMALE GAZE with Kathleen Supove
​June 28, 2025 @ 4 pm @ Michelle's Pianos, Portland, OR

​If you need a soundtrack for writing letters to your elected representatives, building your resilience and sisterhood, or just smashing a few plates - this is it!

Music by Jennifer Wright, Randy Woolf, Kathleen Supove, Beata Moon, and Jerome Kitzke that will reinvigorate your faith in humanity after making room for a solid, humorous, and cathartic rant.......or two, or three!

Huge thanks to our sponsor, Michelle's Pianos!

​Guest Artist:
Ambient Ecology Festival
Maurie Jacobs Park, Eugene, OR
June 7, 2025

This outdoor new music festival from the folks at The Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble (EDME) focuses on the healing properties of deep listening in natural settings. 

My set feature some of my more atmospheric and chill pieces on several of my experimental instruments: 
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"Whalefall" (version for fixed media and destroyed piano); "Wild and Varied Empires Have Inhabited This Place" for Ukrainian hand pan drum; and "Rainmaker" for water, bubbles, submerged objects, and homemade water phone.
Break to Build Part Two: After the Anthropocene
Zidell Yards, South Waterfront, Portland, OR
July 19, 20, 21, 26, 27 & 28, 2024
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This large-scale collaboration with ProLab Dance, created as an Artist in Residence for a second year at Portland's iconic Zidell shipyards, considers a post-modern-age world wherein Nature is re-wilding the built environment.

This show features two world premieres: my composition "Deep Time", which highlights my newest experimental instrument, The Hydra, a double-strung harp that I fashioned from a huge driftwood tree foraged from the Oregon Coast; and "Rainmaker", an experimental soundscape that honors the sacred and life-giving properties of water, in which water itself plays the primary sound role.

​I am grateful to have received a 2023 Arts3C grant award ​from The Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) in support of this project!

The Burned Piano Project 
Exhibition & concert series at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, Portland, OR
Museum & shop hours Wed.-Sun. 11am-4pm   |   724 NW Davis St., Portland, OR 97209   |   503.226.3600

Exhibition on view April 7 - June 30, 2024
Opening reception: Sunday, April 7, 2024 

The Burned Piano Project: Creating Music Amidst the Noise of Hate began with one family’s experience of antisemitism and reminds us of the larger context of rising hate crimes today. In spring 2022, a Portland family’s home, which shares a Jewish organization’s mailing address, was destroyed by arson in the middle of the night. 

Composer and performance artist Jennifer Wright assembled an artistic team to create art from the remains of the family’s burned Steinway grand piano.  Wright also created a fantastical new instrument from the Steinway’s working parts: The Glass Piano.  Join us as Jennifer performs six concerts of the original music she has composed for this one-of-a-kind creation and learn how The Glass Piano came to life! 

Concert dates: 4/21, 5/5, 5/19, 5/29, 6/16 & 6/30 @ 2pm
*Extra date added due to high demand: 6/23 @ 2pm

​More info at www.ojmche.org   
and at The Burned Piano Project page HERE.

Ancient Futures
April 27 & 28, 2024

Alberta Abbey, Portland, OR

My excellent multi-hyphenate friends Patrick Brewer and Daniel Brugh have joined me in creating an otherworldly audio-visual experience combining cinematic new music, wild CG storytelling on a huge screen, and adventurous live performance like you’ve never seen. 

Featuring excerpts from my Skeleton Piano suite Obscure Terrain and Singularity for fixed media and my experimental 'junk' percussion/long strings instrument, the Cloud Gamelan.

​For the first time, The Skeleton Piano showed the secrets of its unusual sound production techniques on its very own Jumbotron!

An unforgettable, family-friendly night of virtual-meets-reality storytelling that presented timeless themes with a sci-fi twist.  

Live at the Jazz Station
June 2, 2024
The Jazz Station, Eugene, OR

What incredible fun to tear up the ivories with two of my favorite pianists-composers-collaborators: Paul Safar and Ted Clifford!

Featuring the world premiere of the piano arrangement of my piece Welcome to the Future, Citizen #2406, the audience participation shenanigans of This Is My Matrix Sweater, and Relatively Minor Infractions with saxophone wiz Daniel Vega!​

No ordinary life, no ordinary vision

"One of the coolest and most interesting music creators on the scene!"
- new music icon Kathleen Supove
"[One] of the organization’s [Cascadia Composers] most creative producer/composers"
- Brett Campbell, Oregon Arts Watch
"The sheer range of Wright’s creations is remarkable."
- Anna Heflin, Which Sinfonia
"Draggy, brassy, nutty, classy...Everybody knows that area composer Jennifer Wright is mad, quite mad."  
 - Matthew Andrews, Oregon Arts Watch
"There are some amazing composers you NEED to know. Like... Jennifer Wright!  Equal parts whimsy, surrealism, social commentary, “feels”, grotesquery and naughtiness, Jennifer Wright is a woman who would most likely serve as the Court Composer to the Bubblegum Princess on Adventure Time and is probably the most entertaining, exciting and important composer you haven’t heard of!"
- Joshua Cheek, music writer
 “Fearless.”
​ - Cynthia Gerdes, composer & Crazy Jane Composers founding member ​
“We love your proposal and we'd really like to do your idea, but it's actually kind of risky, and we don't want the police to show up.”
​ - Risk/Reward Festival, Portland Oregon
​“Some composers model themselves after Chopin, some after Beethoven.  But Jennifer, right out of the gate, invented a style all her own, like no one else - most composers can't do that.”
​ - Daniel Brugh, composer/past vice president of Cascadia Composers 

New videos are out!

Keeping Is Not The Same As Carrying for The Glass Piano
Filmed during the exhibit "The Burned Piano: Creating Music Amidst the Noise of Hate" (April-June 2024) at The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in Portland, Oregon.
​
This piece features The Glass Piano, an experimental instrument that I built from the remains of a Steinway grand piano ruined in an act of arson that destroyed a Jewish family’s home in Portland, OR. I combined the keys & hammer action of the piano with a new resonant body and tuned borosilicate glass rods of varying lengths/diameters as sound producers.

​Let's Say Gay! for voice, piano, toy piano & tambourine
Filmed live at FIERCE, FABULOUS AND FULLY COIFFED! Eugene Edition at First Christian Church, Eugene Oregon, 2023
Performing as my drag ally alter-ego, Tartie FaLouze with the fabulous "Fierce" cast!

​Anthropocene (Legacy) for Skeleton Piano & electronic effects
Filmed live at THE PHOENIX PROJECT: Art in the Time of Climate Emergency at Bodyvox Theater, Portland Oregon, 2021

Dream Evolve Flourish Die for Ukrainian hand pan drum, voice, sand, shakers, amplified natural objects & dance
Filmed live at THIS IS THE PLACE! Arts Festival at PLACE Studios, Portland, Oregon 2022

​There is No "Away" for Skeleton Piano, fabric, & electronic effects
Filmed live at THE PHOENIX PROJECT: Art in the Time of Climate Emergency at Bodyvox Theater, Portland Oregon, 2021

No Disrespect
a once-in-a-lifetime performance art piece for live piano, fixed media, dance, and eco-friendly spray paint
filmed live at Caldera: A Fiery Festival of New Music in Mt. Tabor Park Amphitheater, Portland, Oregon, 2018


​The debut performance of ExPiRhyEns: The Reed Experimental Piano and Rhythm Ensemble (founded/directed by yours truly) performing "Experience is a Form of Paralysis", a structured-improvisation piece that I composed for their inaugural show!
Reed College Friday @ Four: Chamber Music, Elliot Chapel, Reed College, Portland, Oregon on May 5, 2023.

​The world premiere performance video of Whalefall (2017) for solo piano, fixed media & aerial dance!
Featuring the incredible aerial artistry of movement maestra Jordie Campbell!
A big shout-out to the sponsors that have supported my work!




Contact
jenniferawright (at) yahoo.com (email preferred) | 503-475-2406 | 3656 SE Morrison Street, Portland, OR 97214
ASCAP writer / publisher
"The Portland Metro area rests on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River, creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area." - Portland Indian Leaders Roundtable, 2018.  ​I recognize and thank the original caretakers of this land.

​The Skeleton Piano​

Check out my sister site
skeletonpiano.com 
to learn about the world's only Skeleton Piano!