Bio

Long Bio:

A freelance flutist, artist, improviser, and composer in the Seattle area, Leanna Keith (she/they) delights in creating sound experiences that make audiences laugh, cry, and say: “I didn’t know the flute could do that!”  She also teaches as the flute professor at Cornish College of the Arts. Their works focus on spontaneous sound creation, timbre-shifting, the mixed-race experience, queer theory, and the breaking of performer/audience boundaries. She is dedicated to playing music by composers who are still living, and advocates for the usage of music as social activism. 

As a composer, Leanna is interested in cross-genre collaboration, playful exploration, extended techniques for flute, and diaspora storytelling. She has written and premiered countless works for flute and looper pedal, often performed as a part of the Bushwick Book Club - creating pieces about various books of fiction and poetry. In her solo performances, she often improvises new works on the spot, generated from audience prompts to create new soundscapes.

In 2024, Leanna released her second album, "Body of Breath", which features new works for bass flute which were written for Leanna, as a part of their Jack Straw residency. The album release show featured the incredible puppetry of Shadow Girls Cult. They also collaborated with Degenerate Art Ensemble on a new work, Anima Mundi, where she played flute, sang, danced, and played taiko in a ritual practice modeled off of ancient Japanese Shamanism. She also performed as a featured improvising soloist in the “What’s Going On” conduction festival within the 2024 Earshot Jazz Festival.

In 2023 she composed and released "Rice, Blood, Sugar" a piece that explores the experience of heritage language loss, as a part of the Nonseq Series. The work was in collaboration with poet Jenne Hsien Patrick, and featured flute, voices, piano, banjo, viola, and violin. The work was accompanied by a poetry chapbook and programs which were all printed on risograph. She also premiered “To Grasp”, a piece for electronics, hands, various fruit, and curious audience members, which invited the audience to the stage to participate in the sound creation. Commissioned by a consortium spearheaded by Rose Bishop, she created a seven-movement modular work for flute and/or piccolo, which explores extended techniques through various mythologies around the world titled “The Troll and the Fae”, which was published by ALRY in 2024. The book was illustrated by her husband, Daniel Husser.

Commissioned by Dr.Christine Erlander Beard as a part of the #FlutistActivist project, Leanna wrote the piece “Thoughts and Prayers” for solo flute and electronics. The work features an interview with a survivor of the 2007 Westroads Mall Shooting. The work has been performed at many different conferences, colleges, and continues to urge audiences to be active in the fight for gun control laws.

In 2021 she released her first solo album, TAROT Album, which she composed, performed, recorded, and mixed. The album release show premiered online, featuring collaborations between choreographers, digital media artists, stop motion artists, puppetry, and more.

 Leanna virtually presented a new work titled "Water is Easier to Swallow" in collaboration with Dust In Your Eyes Puppetry in fall of 2020 - which explored queer identity and radical queer theory. In 2019 her work: "Finding the InBetween," presented at NW New Works by On The Boards focused on the challenges faced by mixed-race people in America through music, crowd-sourced interviews, spontaneous poetry, and dance. The same summer, she premiered the "Concerto for Tea Ceremony" where audience members participated in a tea ritual as the soloist. In the fall of 2019, she debuted a piece called "imagination is an act of rebellion" at BASE Arts Space where she brought the audience to the stage to share an immersive group composing experience.

She has been nominated for the Seattle Gypsy Rose Lee award in composition and the Seattle Gregory award in composition for the play Sheathed by Maggie Lee. She also wrote and performed the score for the play We Go Mad by Amy Escobar. In 2020 she wrote and performed the theme song for Book-It Repertory Theatre's 2020-2023 season podcast. 

Leanna has been invited to perform as soloist and with chamber ensembles in a wide variety of conferences and festivals including: The National Flute Association Convention (2023, 2022, 2021, 2018, 2017), 2023 & 2020 Mid-Atlantic Flute Festival, 2024, 2022 & 2020 Earshot Jazz Festival, the featured artist for the 2021 Live Music Project Gala Concert, 2025 & 2021 TELEPHONE Art experiment, panelist for the 2020 Mixed-Race Conference, NW New Works Festival 2019 at On The Boards, the 1st and 2nd Canadian Flute Convention, Omaha Under the Radar in 2014 and 2019,  2015 Oscillations Concert Series, Oh My Ears! Festival in 2016 and 2018, Electronic Music Midwest 2017, the 2018 World Flute Festival in Mendoza, Argentina, and NUMUS Northwest 2018. In addition to her performance experience, she has presented her research at universities throughout the country and abroad. She also completed a residency at Avaloch Farm Music Institute in 2017.

Leanna is currently a co-director of the chamber music ensemble Kin of the Moon, with violist/improviser Heather Bentley and composer/vocalist Kaley Lane Eaton. Kin of the Moon is an improvisation-centric, technology-friendly chamber music series incubated in Seattle's rich musical scene. The series explores sonic rituals, promotes cross-pollination of genres, emphasizes the communicative power of specific performance locales, and celebrates the creativity that multiplies itself through the collaboration of performers and composers.

In April of 2015, Leanna published Journey to the East, through ALRY Publications, transcribing traditional Chinese bamboo flute music for modern performance. She has presented her research on dizi and Chinese traditional music to colleagues and students at the 1st Canadian Flute Convention, the University of Nebraska, and the University of South Dakota. ​

In 2016 Leanna earned her Master of Music degree in Flute Performance at the University of Washington in Seattle with Donna Shin. Her undergraduate Bachelor of Music degree in flute performance was under the tutelage of Dr. Christine Erlander Beard at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, with whom she had studied since 2008.  Her studies in orchestral repertoire continued with Erica Peel of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and with Zart Dombourian-Eby of the Seattle Symphony. In addition to her Western classical flute training, Ms. Keith also studied the Chinese Dizi with flutist Dr. Jianxun Xia, and the Japanese Shinobue with flutist Kaoru Watanabe. She served as webmaster for the Seattle Flute Society from 2016-2018, and now serves as the Events Coordinator. She currently serves on the New Music Advisory Committee for the National Flute Association.

In addition to her flute studies, Leanna has taken taiko workshops with: Tiffany Tamaribuchi, Chieko Kojima, Kaoly Asano, Kenny Endo, the Tsumura Family, Shoji Kameda, Kris Bergstrom, Eien Hunter Ishikawa, and Yuichi Kimura.