ABOUT
Dr. Abby Aresty is a sound artist, composer, and educator. Her community-based creative practice empowers individuals to work creatively with sound, and to share their stories while building community through collective making, integrated learning, and storytelling.
Aresty’s site-specific installations have been featured in local and national news outlets; Paths II: The Music of Trees, a temporary installation in Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum, was featured in an interview with Melissa Block on NPR’s All Things Considered and was hailed as “otherworldly” and “sometimes eerie, sometimes transportingly lovely,” by the Seattle Times.
Aresty has presented her research in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong, in conferences including ICMC, Balance/Unbalance, ISEA, and Sonic Environments. She has held fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Grinnell College, and the Acoustic Ecology Lab at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts. She recently taught a workshop in multimodal storytelling for 40 college and university students from around the world as part of a Humanitarian Entrepreneurship summer institute at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
From 2017-2024, Aresty served as Technical Director and Lecturer for the Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) Department at Oberlin Conservatory where she taught the Electronic Music course for Oberlin's Community Music School, and was the Bonner Center for Service Learning's 2019-2020 Faculty Fellow. In 2019, in collaboration with Oberlin Center for the Arts and Oberlin Conservatory, Aresty founded the Girls Electronic Arts Retreat (GEAR), a 5-Day STEAM summer camp for 3-5th grade girls hosted in the TIMARA studios.
Currently, Aresty is serving as Interim Director of Inclusive Excellence in STEM Pedagogy and Undergraduate Research at Oberlin, where she is directing the Office of Undergraduate Research and the Center for Learning, Education, and Research in the Sciences.
Photo Credit: Tanya Rosen-Jones.