Bio

Heidi Hart is a writer, musician, researcher, and curator who grew up between the western US desert and postwar Germany. This dislocation was both difficulty and gift, as Heidi learned to listen to sonic traces of historical trauma, from testimonies of Pueblo elders in land claims cases to overheard war stories. Raised in a musical family, Heidi also absorbed the classical music tradition that she learned to love and question, too. She still works with these questions, as she untangles listening and sound practices with colonialist histories. Her lifelong concern with the more-than-human world has led her to explore similar questions in ecological context.

Heidi holds an MFA (poetry and music) from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in German Studies (music, literature, and politics) from Duke University. She has received a Pushcart Prize for poetry, an ACLS-Mellon Fellowship, a Crafoord Fonden fellowship at Linnaeus University in Sweden, and funding from Novo Nordisk for an international arts assembly hosted by SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen. She has been a selected participant in the Lofoten International Arts Festival in Norway and both the Listening Academy and the OnCurating Academy in Berlin. Heidi is a regular guest instructor at Linnaeus University, where she is an active contributor to the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. She also serves as a Nonresident Senior Research Fellow (Climate and Environment) with the European Center for Populism Studies.

From documenting protest music in Berlin to improvising on a decaying harp in the American South, Heidi finds entry points into varied soundworlds. Trained in Brechtian methods of defamiliarizing musical tropes, she hones in on moments of strangeness or interruption, aware of music’s power to entrance. She has developed the concept of “critical vulnerability” in analyzing environmental art forms, from large-scale exhibitions to novels and films. In her curatorial practice, Heidi fosters connections among artists, musicians, scholars, Indigenous leaders, and curious audiences, whether exploring ethics in listening, care for a planet in crisis, or improvisation as a hands-on democratic practice.

Heidi lives in North Carolina, US and in Växjö, Sweden.