Lea Luka pursues her PhD on music, creative processes and technology in posthuman opera at the University of Cambridge, funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. As an academic, she has been a Fellow at Harvard University’s Mellon School for Performance and Theater Research and was awarded with the Bavarian Cultural Award for her research at MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology. Amongst others, her ethnographic projects brought her to study sound cultures and social processes at the computer music center IRCAM in Paris.
Her research interests include posthumanism, new materialism, media theory, sound studies, science and technology studies, opera studies, musicology, death studies and artistic research.
She has written curatorial and dramaturgical texts for Ars Electronica Festival, Dutch National Opera, Opera Forward Festival, Die Welt’s Feuilleton, Cresc… Biennale for New Music Frankfurt, German Consulate NYC, German Embassy London, Mozartfest Würzburg, Cultural Policy Lab Munich and Ensemble Modern.
Moreover, she is the editor of a research journal on posthuman art with contributions from anthropologist Anna Tsing, Darien Brito and Patricia Kaishian.
Her papers have been presented at the American Musicological Society, the International Musicological Society, the World Congress of the International Federation for Theatre Research, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Acoustic Interface Conference, the Interactive Film and Media Conference and the Transnational Opera Society.
She teaches at University of Cambridge, currently supervising Music in Contemporary Societies, and tutored introduction seminars to Media, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.