Biography

Featured on Yo-Yo Ma's GRAMMY-winning 2017 "Best World Music Album", Small is composer, director, multidisciplinary artist, singer, performer, photographer, and filmmaker. Born in 1979 into a family of musicians, writers, and psychoanalysts, Small spent her childhood playing cello, concocting gibberish sounds, improvising on the piano with her pianist / composer father, dancing, fencing, and performing in musicals that her Renaissance lutenist mother wrote for her and her friends. She became enraptured by photography when she was thirteen. Small spent her high school years photographing her close friends, strangers, and Rachel, her younger sister and longtime muse. In 2001, Small graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BA in photography and moved to Brooklyn the day before September 11th. In 2014, Small birthed The Delirium Constructions (TDC), which has since become the conceptual umbrella for her work cross-genre and has been exhibited on six continents. Co-founded in 2006, Small's vocal trio, Black Sea Hotel, has toured throughout the US and Scandinavia and taught Balkan folk song internationally, specializing in music from the region of Shopluk, Bulgaria. In 2011, Small mounted a 120-participant performative incarnation of TDC, which interwove Balkan vocal music, a string quartet, classical arias, and choral droning, historical and contemporary dress, synchronized facial gestures and dance, and well as two legal marriage ceremonies conducted by Small. In 2013, Small starred in "Butter on the Latch", a psychological thriller feature film, directed by Josephine Decker, which premiered at the Berlinale. In 2017, Small's was commissioned by HERE Arts Center's Prototype Festival to premiere a staged work of her musical album, Secondary Dominance, combining Tableaux, photography, moving image, dance, and singing, with musical genres that interweave electronic, Balkan folk, industrial, pop, punk, rap, rock, and classical. A feature film of Secondary Dominance (a hybrid documentary / dance-centric music video exploring disentanglement from sexual trauma) is scheduled to release Spring 2022. Having just completed her first two chamber works, "Behind the Gymnasium" and "Water in Our Eyes". Small lives on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn in a pink and white home with her two kitties, Bunny and January. She is currently obsessed with learning ballroom Tango, Rumba, and Cha Cha.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Sarah Small