Interview
Fifteen Questions – March 2025
Elaine Mitchener about Working, Composing, and Improvising with her Voice
Ahead of a new Barbican premiere, the experimental vocalist speaks about her practise, disrupting semantic sense and her love for how people say the things they say.
black radical – 19 February 2025
the future is now: an interview with elaine mitchener
Michelle Kambasha
on third spaces, the limits of language and dismantling the notion that black artistic expression is linear and in the distance.
The Quietus – 12 November 2024
Elaine Mitchener on Curating This Year’s Deep Time Festival
Vanessa Ague
We caught up with Mitchener in advance of the event to talk about her curatorial perspective.
The List – 8 April 2024
Change of Future
Stewart Smith
“Pushing boundaries is nothing new for experimental vocalist Elaine Mitchener. Stewart Smith hears how her bold reworking of songs plays an important role in promoting the work of black avant-garde composers.”
Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (IMD) – August 2023
IN CONVERSATION WITH ELAINE MITCHENER AND JULIET FRASER
Sophie Emilie Beha
“They are among the most versatile and go-getting singers of our time. Elaine Mitchener deepened her love of singing as a teenager, through gospel music and jazz, and later through classical training at the conservatory. Juliet Fraser did not begin singing seriously until she was 20 years old – until then she wanted to be an oboist. For both, singing was a need, a form of artistic expression, a fulfillment.”
Field Notes – March 2023
“The Job Is to Make the Score Live.” Elaine Mitchener on On Being Human as Praxis
Kristoffer Patrick Cornils
“On Being Human as Praxis” was conceived by Elaine Mitchener. The vocal artist invited five different composers—Jason Yarde, Matana Roberts, Laure M. Hiendl, Tansy Davies, and George E. Lewis—to respond to the work of the Jamaican feminist and cultural theorist Sylvia Winter.
Royal Academy Magazine – September 2021
Three artists on Dance
‘I approach dance with a musician’s sensibility,’ says vocalist, composer and movement artist Elaine Mitchener, whose work appears in ‘British Art Show 9’, a major group exhibition that takes the temperature of contemporary art every five years (touring nationally until 23 Dec 2022).
The Guardian – 20 August 2021
‘Come on this journey with me’: Elaine Mitchener, Britain’s boldest vocalist
Jennifer Lucy Allan
“Classically trained with a three-octave range, the genre-exploding performer dissolves her voice into astonishing gasps and stutters to confront the horror of colonial history.”