Bill Fontana [born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1947] is an American composer and media artist living in San Francisco, who has developed an international reputation for his pioneering experiments in sound. Since the early 1970s, Fontana has used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. After studying philosophy and music at the New School for Social Research in New York and the Cleveland Institute of Music, Fontana has created sound sculptures and radio projects for museums and broadcast organisations around the world. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Berliner Künstler Programm of the DAAD, and the Arts Council of England.

His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Post Museum in Frankfurt, the Art History and Natural History Museums in Vienna, Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, the 48th Venice Biennale, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, MAXXI in Rome, and MAAT in Lisbon, and the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.. He has done major radio sound art projects for the BBC, the European Broadcast Union, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, West German Radio [WDR], Swedish Radio, Radio France and the Austrian State Radio. He currently has a major exhibition in Kunsthaus Graz, Austria.

“I began my career as a composer. What really began to interest me was not so much the music that I could write but the states of mind I would experience when I felt musical enough to compose. In those moments, when I became musical, all the sounds around me also became musical.” — Bill Fontana

www.resoundings.org
Image © Alexandra Fontana