about

Musician, composer, artist, and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including intricate recorded albums, performances, and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Jeffrey Gibson, Layli Long Soldier, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Kronos Quartet, Martha Colburn, New Red Order, Martin Bisi, Ryan Sawyer, Susan Alcorn, and Loren Connors.

An inquisitive, exquisite amplified violinist, Ortman is also versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, vocals and captures capacious field recordings.

Laura has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, La Biennale di Venezia, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, SITE Santa Fe, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, REWIRE Festival, Baltimore Museum of Art, The Stone, SF JAZZ, Gagosian, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, MoMA PS1, Toronto Biennial of Art, Borealis Festival, CBGB's, Skaņu Mežs, Pioneer Works, Roulette Intermedium, Sonic Acts Biennial, DIA Foundation, Centro de las Artes Inmersivas, Calder Foundation, National Sawdust, La Rosa, Experimental Sound Studio (ESS), Making Their Mark Forum, and Centre Pompidou, among countless established and DIY venues in North America and Europe.

Ortman had her Carnegie Hall premiere with the Kronos Quartet in April 2026 in New York City, featuring new music for amplified violin, Apache violin, voice, and string quartet.

In 2008, she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-North American Indigenous orchestra that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s "In the Land of the Head Hunters" (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native cast that premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in NYC and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to sold-out audiences.

Ortman is the recipient of the 2026 First Peoples Fund Native Performing Arts Fellowship, 2025 Pioneer Works Music Residency, 2023 Institute of American Indian Arts Fellowship, 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Camargo Foundation Residency, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room. Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.