pc: Caroline Mariko-Stucky

“Uber-compelling…A must-see, must-hear…Annie’s creativity is astounding, to listen to her an education in deep listening as she pours so much beauty and intensity into her composing, choreographing, dancing and playing of the flute.” - Steph Thompson, ListenUpNYC

“…haunting…these dancers, together with Nikunen’s marvelous score, succeed…” -DanceCritical

“…daring, vulnerable, vividly expressive, and outstandingly imaginative.” -Jamie Clark

“There’s real imagination in this effecting music.” - Long Island Music Hall of Fame

“Nikunen dances and also plays the flute, both at a very high level…the fact that Ms. Nikunen also wrote the music and created the choreography sets this performance on a…higher plane.” -SoundWordSight Arts Magazine

About Annie…

Annie Nikunen (b. Northport, NY) is a NYC-based multidisciplinary sound-movement artist, drawing from both areas in her process, and amalgamating them in her practice. As a composer, flutist, choreographer, dancer, curator and radio broadcaster, she uses physical space as a vector and vessel to invite dialogue between ear, eye and body. She de-/re-constructs performer-composer boundaries, keen to expand interconnections between movement and sound, and how they relate to emotion, memory, and time, and furthermore how they represent brokenness and healing. Using her skills as a Marketing and Creative Director, she curates spaces for connecting sound and sensory experience. As an Artist Ambassador for Creatives Care, Nikunen applies her passion for these subjects that entangle our artistic and personal lives, striving to create communities where artists feel connected and heard in talking about the emotions, vulnerabilities and mental health struggles unique to each and every sub-field of the arts that often leave us feeling isolated and misunderstood. As an established curator for radio, she also designs programming centered around how these artistic and personal areas intersect.

With her work spanning a wide variety of form, genre and medium, Nikunen creates based on collective human experiences that are paradoxically individualized, striving to make her work broadly relatable yet deeply personal, sonically and somatically communicating emotion as empirically and intimately as possible so listeners and observers may find personal resonance. With improvisation, Live Art and a narrative-driven methodology at the core of her sonic and physical exploration, Nikunen extracts sound from choreographic gesture and the open secrets of emotion, inviting performers to embody the story within their own body, mind and heart. Nikunen sees her movement practice as ephemeral installation, where she works from uniquely-stitched lineages of people, experiences and memories that can never be replicated, filled with the past we built, present we live, and future yet to be seen. After initially pursuing ballet, she began exploring modern dance as well as contact improvisation, all of which influence her mappings of movement and sound. Her research interests examine sound-body connections, composer-choreographer relationships, embodied cognition, and sound’s relationships with gesture, language/text, space, time, emotion and memory.

Nikunen’s works have been featured nationally and internationally across the US and Europe, performed by ensembles including The Phoenix Symphony, members of The Albany Symphony, International Contemporary Ensemble, the TMC Fromm Players, Unheard-of//Ensemble, ZOFO, BlackBox Ensemble, Earth Ears Ensemble, The Rhythm Method and Fonema Consort, as well as renowned soloists including Jeffrey Zeigler, Eleonor Sandresky, Melinda Faylor, Mieko Kanno, Iida-Vilhelmiina Sinivalo, and Jamie Clark. An avid collaborator, she has worked with composers, performers, theorists, visual artists, sound artists, music technologists, photographers, cinematographers, filmmakers, dancers and choreographers including Matt Sargent, Sugar Vendil, Da’von Doane, Rohan Bhargava, Julian Day, Zara Lawler, Kosta Karakashyan, Anselm Havu, and more. She has performed and had her work presented at venues and institutions including Musikkittalo at the Sibelius Academy, Tanglewood Music Center, Roulette, National Sawdust, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Mark Morris Dance Group, The Clark Art Institute, HighLineNine for the Chelsea Music Festival, The Noguchi Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Harn Museum of Art, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Bulgaria, Central Park, Miller Theater and The DiMenna Center for Classical Music. She has taught, led workshops and presented at The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Stetson University School of Music, Williams College, Fove Towns College, and Posey School of Dance.

Referred to as the "...best flute player in the state of NY" by The Observer, Nikunen has performed in contemporary, classical, jazz, indie rock, theater, dance and Taizé settings. She is a founding member of NYC-based new music group Blackbox Ensemble, for which she is the flutist and Artistic Planning & Communications Manager. She performs with groups such as Sugar Vendil/Isogram and String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and has also performed with Miranda Cuckson and Nunc. She also served as resident composer and choreographer/flutist/dancer of Periapsis Music & Dance. Nikunen is a former DJ at WKCR, where she served as Business Manager and Director of the Classical Department. She hosted the coveted and beloved Afternoon Classical and Bach Hour each Friday, featuring music from classical to dance to the edge of experimental. She also specializes in dance music, featuring programs such as music of New York City Ballet rep and music set to work by female choreographers. Her interviewees included Ola Gjielo, Rachel Barton Pine, Anne Akiko Meyers, Miró Quartet, Colin Hinton, and Columbia University’s DMA composers, among others.

Nikunen holds a MM in Composition from NYU as well as a BA in Music (composition/theory) from Barnard College of Columbia University, where she also studied contemporary flute performance at Manhattan School of Music with Tara O’Connor. Principal composition mentors include Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, Joan La Barbara, Georg Friedrich Haas, Zosha di Castri, Seth Cluett and Ellie Hisama. Nikunen has received recognition and fellowships from Tanglewood (2023 Composition Fellow), American Composers Forum, ASCAP and Columbia University, where she was the recipient of the Charles S. Miller Award as well as the Boris & Eda Rappoport Prize, both for distinction in music composition.

Upcoming projects include working on an album with electronic composer/guitarist Matt Sargent as Choreosonic as well as some new pieces yet to be announced!