about

 A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Kronos Quartet, Martha Colburn, New Red Order, Martin Bisi, and Demian DinéYazhi. 

An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings.

Laura has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Venice Biennale, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, REWIRE Festival at the Hague, 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 in Latvia, Pioneer Works, Roulette Intermedium, DIA Foundation, Calder Foundation, Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe.

In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American 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 has 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.

Ortman is the recipient of the 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 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 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, 2014-15 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.