Anna Friz creates media art, sound and transmission art, working across platforms to present installations, broadcasts, films and performances. Her creative and scholarly works often reflect upon media ecologies, land use, infrastructures, time perception, radio and transmission art histories, and critical fictions. She specializes in self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. Currently her focus is on a series of audiovisual works under the title We Build Ruins, which expressively consider mining and industrial corridors in the high altitude desert in northern Chile; Useful Radio, a live performance and installation created with Jeff Kolar based on Rick Prelinger’s radio listening archives; and Revenant, a solo radio art work evolving into installation iterations that explore mortality and metamorphosis.
In the autumn of 2015 she joined the Film and Digital Media department at University of California Santa Cruz, where she is currently Professor of Sound. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the department of Sound (2011-2013), funded by the Fonds de recherche Québec – société et culture (FRQ). She earned her Ph.D. in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture from York University, Tkaronto/Toronto in 2011; her dissertation is entitled “The Radio of the Future Redux: Rethinking Transmission Through Experiments in Radio Art.”
Anna is a Guggenheim Fellow (2023), and has been a Rydell Visual Arts Fellow (2022) and a Hellman Fellow (2018). She received the Karl Sczuka Prize for Radio in 2024, was awarded a Phonurgia Nova residency award for GRM/INA studio in Paris, France in 2019, was a finalist for the Phonurgia Nova Sound Art Prize in 2026 and 2017, and received 2nd place in the Prix Palma Ars Acoustica 2014. In 2011 she was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore award (Toronto) and the Betty Mitchell award (Calgary) for excellence in composition and sound design for theatre.
Ongoing collaborations with Absolute Value of Noise, Jeff Kolar, Cid Pearlman, Cynthia Ling Lee, and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino; also with the Conduction Series collective, the NRRF Radio Collective, and CWCH Collective. Anna has been an itinerant collaborator with the Toronto-based Public Studio collective, whose work together included multi-channel film installations and sculptures which critically consider the social politics of landscape, environment and urban systems.
Presentations of her work in the recent years include Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), SITE Gallery (Houston), the New York Times Magazine, esc Median Kunst Labor (Graz, Austria), ReWire Festival (The Hague, Netherlands), Soundhouse at the Barbican (London UK), Espace Multimedia Gantner (Belfort France), and RE:SOUND Festival (Aalborg, Denmark). Her radio art/works have been heard on the airwaves of more than 25 countries, and commissioned by national public radio in Austria, Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, and Mexico. Her work has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Fonds de recherche Québec – société et culture, York University (Toronto), Concordia University (Montréal), Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Québec Delegation in Mexico, the SOCAN Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, the John R. Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arts Research Institute and the Committee on Research at University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as numerous commissions in North America and abroad.
Anna is long time affiliate of Wave Farm in Upper Hudson Valley, NY, and a long-time contributor to ORF Kunstradio, Austria. She currently serves on the board of Indexical, an artist-run center dedicated to experimental sound and media art in Santa Cruz, CA.
ONGOING WORK:
We Build Ruins: Umbrella title for a suite of pieces created from fieldwork in the Atacama desert in Chile from 2017-2022. Consisting of audiovisual, audio, and radio works, We Build Ruins reflects on landscape, infrastructure, and environmental change, exploring the micro and macro scales of human intervention and activity in harsh yet complex environments which occupy the space between urban sprawl and wilderness, and investigates the role of people (and artists) as agents in the myth-making and storytelling process which bring critique and create counter-narratives to those of progress and growth that propel unsustainable extractivist corporate and state-sponsored industries. We Build Ruins includes a feature-length radio art work entitled Children of the Sun, supported by a residency at GRM studios in Paris and a Guggenheim Fellowship, a live-scored audiovisual concert entitled Salar: Adaptation, and a full-length experimental film that is in the finishing stages. Past works include Radiation Day, the multi-channel installation Salar: Evaporation, and the short film about overburden piles produced by mining entitled We are surrounded by torta.
RECENT WORK:
Embodied Radio Device/Solar Radio: created together with Absolute Value of Noise and powered by his design for the solar radio; Embodied Radio Device was permanently installed at the Wave Farm in Acra, NY in autumn 2022.
you, beloved: a radio art work created together with Amy Mihyang Ginther, Cynthia Ling Lee, and Gabriel Saloman; premiere broadcast for 12-12-12-12 project directed by Christof Migone in December 2020.
Sound, Signal, Conductor (2014-2018): series of works originating in Iceland, utilizing extending approaches to recording, re-playing and filtering sounds through the landscape and built environment. Also using pinhole and digital photography to create stills and stop motion video. Yielding weathered copper artifacts, installation works, suitcase transmitters, and undertaking performative actions which sonify structures and electro-magnetic space in situ. Funded by Canada Council for the Arts. Including Aftergrain, a solo installation at SITE, a gallery occupying the industrial space of a former rice silo complex in Houston, Texas; and Echophone, a radiophonic installation commissioned by Radius Chicago for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
Radiation Day (2017-2018): audio visual performance and installation works stemming from research in northern Chile, along the industrial continuum. Radiation Day (with visuals by Rodrigo Ríos Zunino) premiered at Ars Electronica’s Big Concert Night 2017.
The Joy Channel: with Emmanuel Madan. The final iteration of our radio art/radio play /speculative fiction piece about the state of radio in North America 150 years in the future. Finalist for the Phonurgia Nova Sound Art Prize in 2017. Released on IO SOUND in 2018.