Kaitlin McSweeney is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer and composer currently living and working in Oakland. Her mom introduced her to drawing and classical singing at a young age, and her dad introduced her to synthesizers. She began practicing visual art at a young age, eventually exploring painting, printmaking, sculpture, animation, photography and film. In music, after a couple of decades studying and performing classical repertoire, she began to focus more on her own compositions, approaching them with curiosity and improvisational sensitivity. Currently she works with prepared cello, contact microphones, piano, synthesizers, modified amplifiers, found or created resonant objects, and voice, moving between acoustic, live looping, and minimally amplified arrangements, and is interested in feedback as a collaborative element, as part of an ongoing exploration of what an embodied (sensory/sensual) approach to composing, specifically in the context of noise music, can look like.

Influenced deeply by Pauline Oliveros and their practices and teachings around Deep listening, the concept of the erotic as power in the work of Audrey Lorde, as well as her own lifelong challenges with having a body, she feels for ways to authentically return to a state of presence even when the sensory ecologies are chaotic, raw or harsh - or to meet softer, more intricate sensual moments with presence even if coming off an armored state, in a feeling for that which supports overall resilience, both within the physical body and within a performance, composition, or collaboration.

In her solo practice, she incorporates listening while walking (sound-walking) as a way of practicing attunement to softer subtler states and investigating how those states could be invited in performance and composing. To practice presence with harsher noise, she spent two summers going out to street corners (basically busking but not in nice areas) to explore spontaneous performance as a way of composing (exposure to elements, indifference of environment to the performance, overstimulation). Her solo project captainmcsweeney reflects these practices, and leaves room for change. She continues to search out and create new practices to explore the development of individual resilience, while recognizing improvisational, collaborative noise music as a particularly fertile ground for practicing relational and even communal resilience.

She is also working with Meyer Sound to learn how to compose multi-channel (6 or more) pieces, which she hopes to develop into interactive sound environments that invite audience members to participate in a tangible experience of electronic media. Embodiment and working with the body and senses have always been a central theme in her work, yet she feels it's increasingly important with the current saturation of artificial intelligence in previously 'hand-crafted' realms such as writing, painting and music. While she does not want to reject the exploration of new technologies, she asks "how can we welcome them without losing touch? How can we ally with technology so that our physicality is nourished, rather than left to atrophy?"