about

Leah Blankendaal is a multi-award-winning musician whose work emphasizes pause, connection and layered textures. Her language is "kind, immersive and thoughtful,” and offers “us space to breathe and to be.” 

At home as both a composer and performer of new music, Blankendaal's practice spans traditional chamber music and vocal composition, live electronic improvisation and installation art. As a composer she has collaborated with leading ensembles including Quince Ensemble (USA), Duo Alterity (USA), Rubiks Collective (VIC), Luminescence Chamber Singers (ACT), Tura New Music and STRUT Dance (WA), the Australian Art Orchestra and Soundstream (SA). A regular performer and improviser of original material, Blankendaal’s performance based practice for solo flute and loop pedal has been critically celebrated for “gracefully summoning you into its realm with its beautiful harmonic suspensions and resolutions”. Her work has toured Europe, South East Asia, USA and New Zealand. 

Blankendaal has been the recipient of the ABC Classic Composer Commissioning Fund, APRA AMCOS 2020 Art Music Fund Commission, the 2020 Peggy Glanville Hicks Commission, and the 2017 Australian Music Centre Classical: Next Fellowship. She released her first solo album, Alongside, Amongst, Against in September 2020. Her work Lake, performed by Luminescence Chamber Singers, was released on ABC Classic in 2024.