Biography

Christopher Willes (b. 1986) is an artist, composer, musician, and dramaturge based in so-called Canada. His work explores listening as both subject and method, blending experimental music and sound, performance, and visual art. His projects are iterative and developed through collaborative practices with trained and untrained performers, children and seniors, musicians, visual artists, and dancers. The resulting works take many forms: site-specific concerts, staged performances, one-on-one works, audio and digital artworks, publications, community arts workshops, sound walks, and archival interventions.

He holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of Toronto and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College (USA). He is a two-time Chalmers Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow (USA), and an affiliated researcher at the Milieux Institute (Montreal). He was an associate artist with Public Recordings from 2016 to 2024, and led the organization as a co-artistic producer. He also worked as a composer and dramaturge with the contemporary dance company Dancemakers from 2011 to 2015. He is currently studying conflict mediation at the University of Waterloo.

Notable works include MANUAL (co-created with Adam Kinner), a one-on-one performance staged covertly in public libraries, that has toured widely around the world since 2022. Since 2018, his project Six Turntables has staged noise music concerts with students across Canada, reworking recordings from local histories of experimental music through workshops and performances. With Public Recordings he created Resonance Gathering, a publication and performance project on the music of Pauline Oliveros (Art Metropole, 2023), and What's Collective?, a workshop series shared internationally from 2019 to 2024. Christopher has been active in experimental and improvised music since the mid-2000s.

Christopher was a recurring artist-in-residence at the Toronto Public Library (2017–2023), where he created experimental music performances and workshops with teens and seniors. He has taught at the University of Toronto, Concordia University, the Musagetes Foundation, Tramway (Glasgow), Studio 303 (Montreal), and elsewhere. At Studio 303 he leads Collaborating Through Scores, an annual workshop on the use of scores in collaborative processes.

Christopher's work has been presented across Canada, the USA, the UK, Scandinavia, France, Switzerland, Thailand, and Japan. Recent presentations include the Toronto Biennial of Art, Musée d'art de Joliette (Quebec), PuSH Festival (Vancouver), Kyoto Experiment and YCAM (Japan), Take Me Somewhere (Scotland), Fierce Festival (England), Moving In November (Finland), and Bétonsalon (France).

Contact:
info@christopherwilles.com
Instagram: @christopherwilles