"The most overtly seductive was Dai Fujikura’s Cello Concerto, written for Katinka Kleijn, a player of formidable expressive gifts." -The New York Times (Photo: Ricardo Adame)
Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” cellist Katinka Kleijn has established a genre-defying career spanning concert performance, performance art, improvisation, composition, noise and installation. Frequently exploring the cello as a body corollary to her own, she places the instrument in thought-provoking and theatrical new contexts while collapsing the boundaries between traditionally siloed practices. She presents her projects as co-constructions with performers and audiences, calling upon them to collectively negotiate a way forward.
Her multidisciplinary solo work Scratching, presented at EXPO CHICAGO 2025, examines the role of the female body in orchestra culture, actualizing conductor Sir Thomas Beecham’s remark: “Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it.”
As 2025 Artist-in-Residence at the Momentary at Crystal Bridges, Kleijn performed Bionic Synthmap, an interactive audiovisual work for eight synthesizers, wireless headphones, copper wire and projection, on the Momentous Festival’s opening night, utilizing the museum’s 80-foot projection tower. In April 2026, she performed the work at Symphony Center, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s iconic stage became a sonified surface, activated by the audience’s touch.
With cellist Lia Kohl, Kleijn waded with 30 cellos through Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for Water on the Bridge. Her Intelligence in the Human-Machine, a duet between her cello and her own brainwaves, was described by Time as “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.
As a composer, she was commissioned by the Formosa Quartet to write Stridulation, for string quartet, electronics and resonating body, which premiered in Chicago in September 2026. Ensemble Dal Niente performed her Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers, at the 2022 Big Ears Festival.
Her Butoh dance collaborations span NYC’s Art Bath and Vangeline’s Unforgotten: Butoh for 9/11 in Times Square (2026); in November, she performs her original score for Iván Espinosa & Company’s Plucking off the Darkness of the Galaxy at Kyoto’s International Butoh Festival.
A member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the International Contemporary Ensemble, Kleijn also performs experimental solo sets that have taken her from Chicago to Berlin’s km28 and Sowieso. Her recordings include Dai Fujikura’s Cello Concerto with Karina Canellakis, David Baker’s Cello Concerto with the Chicago Sinfonietta, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ubique with Claire Chase, and an avant-folk record on Drag City with guitarist Bill MacKay. VISTAS, her album with Kari Watson on modular synth, was released on the Berlin-based label Elektramusic and led to a performance at the Sound & Gravity Festival.
