Christine Southworth (b. 1978) is a composer and video artist based in Lexington, Massachusetts, dedicated to creating art born from a cross-pollination of sonic and visual ideas. Inspired by intersections of technology and art, nature and machines, and musics from cultures around the world, her work employs sounds and images from man and nature, from Van de Graaff Generators to honeybees, Balinese gamelan to seismic data from volcanoes.
Southworth received a B.S. from MIT in 2002 in mathematics and an M.A. in Computer Music & Multimedia Composition from Brown University in 2006. In 2003 she co-founded Ensemble Robot, a collaborative of artists and engineers that design and build musical robots. She was a member and general manager of MIT-based Gamelan Galak Tika from 1999-2013, and composed several pieces for the group performed at venues including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, EMPAC, the Cleveland Museum of Art, several Bang on a Can Marathons, and the Bali International Arts Festival. In 2010, she helped design the MIDI "Gamelan Elektrika" for her piece Supercollider, which was premiered at Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival with the Kronos Quartet. In addition to gamelan, she plays guitar and bagpipes.
Southworth's work has been performed worldwide by ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Gamelan Galak Tika, Calder Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Gamelan Semara Ratih, California EAR Unit, Andrew W.K., and Ensemble Robot. She has received awards from the American Music Center, UCross Foundation, LEF Foundation, American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer, New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), the MIT Eloranta Fellowship, and Bang on a Can and has been a fellow at UCross Foundation and The Hermitage Artist Retreat. Her multimedia compositions have been performed and installed at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and at MIT.
She has four recordings available on Airplane Ears Music: Zap! (2008) and Gamelan Galak Tika: Bronze Age Space Age (2009), Christine Southworth String Quartets (2013), performed by The Calder Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Gamelan Galak Tika, and Face the Music, with support from the American Music Center CAP Recording Grant, and In My Mind and In My Car (2013), for Evan Ziporyn on bass clarinet, electronics and video. Her current project is Mushroom Modulations and she is the inaugural Artist in Residence at Native Plant Trust's Garden in the Woods.
Southworth founded R.E.A.L. Cruzan Cats in 2016, a nonprofit cat rescue based in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. She built the organization from a small rescue to a Guidestar platinum rated organization that has found homes for over 1000 cats and kittens and TNVRed (trap-neuter-vaccinate-return) over 6000 cats on the island.