Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Music, Composition, Improvisation, Performance, Public Art
Website: sukiokane.com
Suki O’Kane is an Oakland-based musician, composer, improviser, and instigator who works across music, movement, expanded cinema, and public art. A classically trained mallet percussionist, she has been a resident of Oakland’s Jingletown neighborhood since 1994, where her practice draws deeply on community histories and the sonic landscape of the East Bay. Her work has been supported by the California Arts Council, the Creative Work Fund, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Oakland Stock, and New Music USA.
O’Kane has composed for two of the Bay Area’s leading experimental theater companies. She received three commissions from Theatre of Yugen in collaboration with playwright Erik Ehn — Frankenstein (2003), The Cycle Plays (2007), and Cordelia (2011) — and has worked extensively with inkBoat, co-composing Line Between (2011) with Jason Ditzian, participating in the perambulatory tribute 95 RITUALS (for Anna Halprin) (2015), and collaborating on Seeds in the Desert (2019). She is a longtime member of the Thingamajigs Performance Group alongside Dylan Bolles, Keith Evans, and Edward Schocker, and of the ensemble She Mob.
Beyond ensemble work, O’Kane has collaborated with composers and performers including Pamela Z, Christina McPhee, Dohee Lee, Dan Plonsey, and Lucio Menegon. She is developing new work for Erik Ehn’s 32-play cycle What A Stranger May Know and continues to build the Illuminated Corridor, a nomadic public art project creating streetscapes of live experimental music and performative projection across West Marin, Oakland, and San Francisco.
O’Kane describes herself as “a student of monumental and durational forms, combining Jurassic electronics, everyday objects and found sounds to create noisy, hand held miniatures.” Her practice moves fluidly between durational performance, graphic scoring, field recording, and site-specific sound installation. She is equally at home composing intricate theatrical scores and leading community-embedded listening experiences that blur the boundary between art-making and civic engagement.
Her social practice work engages directly with neighborhood history and displacement. Her commission East Bay: Redline Redefined (2022) for Thingamajigs took the form of geo-located sonic tours, graphic scores, and a community bike ride through Oakland’s Jingletown, tracing the legacy of the 1937 HOLC redlining maps and the long history of exclusion and erasure in the Clinton and Brooklyn townships. Her expanded cinema work includes the multimedia platform Gravity Spells II (2022), presented at The Lab in San Francisco, with a companion LP release on Bimodal Press.
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