Photography by Heike Liss. Black and white portrait of Thea. Thea Farhadian is a performer/composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work extends over a wide range of disciplines in projects including solo violin and interactive electronics, acoustic improvisation, solo laptop, radio art, and scoring experimental video. Her solo pieces for violin and electronics combine a classical music background with extended technique, digital processing, and extensive improvisation.

In October 2024 her second solo album, Tattoos and Other Markings, will be released by Other Minds Records. It is an evocation of the symbols of cultural memory and integrates ethnographic materials with a more mechanical, abstracted soundscape. She grew up listening to Armenian folk and sacred music, which eventually led her to the study of Arabic music with a number of eminent teachers, notably the Palestinian oud and violin master Simon Shaheen.

Generally speaking, Farhadian’s solo work comprises an aesthetic range from more textured, noise-based sound to more tonal and microtonal realms employing free tonality and extended technique. Her first solo album, Tectonic Shifts (Creative Sources CS 365), features real-time processing to create twisted echoes, jagged rhythms and microtonal landscapes and was highly praised by reviewers internationally (“What separates her from the typical...tedium- transmitting specimens is the ability to render the most absurd-sounding complications with sensible unambiguity. Furthermore...she’s not afraid of highlighting the magnetism of a romantic modernity through the use of purer tones across transitional environments.” -Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes). She has also founded BlackCopper Editions, a record label for improvised and experimental music. In her collaborative projects, she has worked with such artists as Tomomi Adachi, Kim Anno, Shelley Hirsch, Heike Liss, Silvia Matheus, Amy X Neuberg, Tim Perkis and Dean Santomieri.

Her work has been heard internationally at the Issue Project Room, the Downtown Music Gallery, and Alternative Museum in New York City; Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Sowieso, and Quiet Cue in Berlin; the Center for New Music, the Room Series, and Meridian Gallery in San Francisco; the Center for Experimental Art and the Aram Khachaturian Museum in Yerevan, Armenia; and the International Women's Electroacoustic Listening Room Project at Bimhaus in Amsterdam, among others.

She has been a curator of experimental video, co-founded the Armenian Film Festival in New York City, and co-curated the festival when it was bought to San Francisco. She has held residencies at Steim in the Netherlands, Bait Makan in Jordan, and the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California. She was a lecturer in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has done university presentations at Columbia University in New York, and City University of London.

Farhadian started as a violinist and played in the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano for ten years. She has a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from San Francisco State University and an M.F.A. in Electronic Music from Mills College. She lives in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. www.theafarhadian.com