Biography
Job Title: Principal Lecturer
Courses Taught: BA (Hons) Music (Jazz)
Specialisms: Jazz Voice, Composition
Lauren Kinsella is an Irish born award winning vocalist and composer based in London, who performs within several styles ranging from jazz, folk, contemporary classical, to sound poetry and free-improvisation.
Current projects include Snowpoet, her duo with pianist Kit Downes exploring the music of Paul Motian, her duo with British saxophonist Tom Challenger and Abhra, the pan European sextet led by French saxophonist Julien Pontivanne.
Kinsella’s accolades include the 2017 Arts Foundation Fellowship in Jazz composition, Vocalist of the Year at 2016 Jazz FM Awards, the Kenny Wheeler Prize in 2013 and the Birmingham Jazzlines Fellowship in 2015. She has received several commissions including a BBC Radio 3 Franz Kafka commission and a commission from Marsden Jazz Festival. Kinsella has been the successful recipient of the PRS for Music Foundation Women Make Music Award in 2016 and the PRSF Beyond Boarders funding scheme which will see her and Snowpoet tour their next album in 2018.
Kinsella’s work continues to be reviewed in several countries including the USA, Germany, the UK, France, Norway, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Ireland and her music is featured regularly on radio stations including BBC Radio 3 and Radio 6, RTE Lyric FM, Jazz FM, BBC Radio Scotland, Le Bande Passante, Sverigesradio and ORF Radio. To date, Kinsella has released critically acclaimed albums on Edition Records, WideEarRecords, Diatribe and Two River Records.
Interested in cross arts practice and the fusing of theatre, movement and improvisation, Kinsella premiered Somewhere in Between at the Birmingham Literature festival with celebrated Irish actor Peter Campion as part of her Jazzlines commission, and has toured extensively with Ian Wilson’s I Burn for You and The Last Siren involving her work as a theatre musician incorporating movement, speech and vocal sound within a contemporary libretto style sung monologue.
She has participated on several music and cross-disciplinary residencies at Bore Place, Kent, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland, The Dock Arts Centre, Ireland, at the Detours de Babel Festival, Grenoble, The Ark Cultural Centre, Ireland and at Mlecernia, Wroclaw, Poland.
Originally born in Dublin, she completed her masters at the Royal Academy of Music, London.
