Mia Pixley

Residency: July 6 - August 31, 2021

 
 
 
 
 

Photo by Sina Dehghani

Mia Pixley is a cellist, composer, singer-songwriter, and performer of Venezuelan and Nigerian descent. She uses her cello, voice, and music performance to playfully study and represent aspects of self and other, community, and the natural world. Protectively whimsical and simultaneously melancholic, Pixley’s music gravitates toward the beauty hidden in sorrow, pain, and loss and this beauty’s potential to inspire curiosity, wonder, rebirth, and reconnection to ourselves, each other, and the natural world.

Pixley has recorded cello on Grammy-award-winning albums (Fantastic Negrito and Please Don’t be Dead) and performed in award-winning off-Broadway productions (Futurity and Lucille Lortel Award). In 2021, she recorded cello and voice for the Harlem-based, site-specific soundwalk, The Visitation, produced by HERE Arts and she was comusic director for the site-specific theatre piece When Your Skin Calls You Home.

Pixley’s discography includes Inside Under, an EP released under the alias Baeilou, and Spar Suite: A music and visual art call and response, a visual art and music collaborative suite with artist/husband, Kevin Shaw. She released her first full length album, Margaret in the Wild in 2021, and the collaborative album Passage in 2022. 

She was born in Texas and lives and works in Alameda, California.

miapixley.com

Video of Mia Pixley, Cello, and Shannon Gray, Aerialist, SF Aerial Arts Festival 2022