Sarah Nicolls

Sarah Nicolls is a UK-based experimental pianist, at the forefront of innovations in piano performance. She works with interactive technologies, such as body sensors and motion capture to augment the acoustic piano, bringing it into the realm of electronic music with visceral live performances. Sarah also invented the ‘Inside-out piano’, a sculptural feast of an instrument on which she creates her own music. She was recently funded through the Athena Swan scheme to have her second Inside-Out Piano built by Pierre Malbos (Paris).

In the rest of her concert career, Sarah is a frequent soloist, recently performing in the New Music Biennial and Matthew Herbert’s 20 Pianos project. With the London Sinfonietta Sarah has given world premieres such as Larry Goves’ Piano Concerto and Richard Barrett’s Mesoptamia. She is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and features on several CDs.

Sarah is a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University and has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Brunel Research Initiative and Enterprise Fund (BRIEF), the Athena Swan award and Arts Council England. She writes about live electronics and compositional collaborations and has been published in the Leonardo Music Journal (LMJ20). Sarah is Artistic Director of the BEAM Festival and was Music Chair for the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference: NIME2014, London.