About

Leyna Marika Papach is an interdisciplinary composer from Japan and the United States. With music as her central lens, she has created a body of work spanning theater, opera, dance, poetry, film, and the visual arts, exploring the topics of 'unrootedness', the cosmology of music, and our connection to the invisible.

Her work has been presented in Europe, Japan, West Africa, and the US, with support from the MAP Fund, NEA, HERE Arts Center, Minnesota Opera, and BAX. She is a recipient of the ACF Music Creators Award (2019), the McKnight Composer Fellowship (2024), and the Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship (2008).

Leyna has collaborated with artists across disciplines, including playwrights Aya Ogawa and Melisa Tien, director Eric Ting, Hindustani vocalist Tapan Kanti Baidya, choreographers Clarinda Mac Low and Michel Kouakou, and poets Layli Long Soldier and Will Alexander, amongst many others. She has also performed as a violinist for Taylor Mac, J.G. Thirlwell, and the Geraldine Fibbers alongside her solo work. Her ongoing dance duet with Butoh dancer Chikako Bando, KAGEGOTO (shadow things), explores the intersection of music, movement, and poetry, while her duet WAVES, with Demeun Strange, ventures into the sonic realms of ambient dreamscapes.

Leyna studied violin at the Prague Academy of Music, holds an MA in Theater-Dance Studies from DAS Theater (Amsterdam), an MFA in Sound/Music/Interdisciplinary Studies from Bard College, and trained in dance at L'Ecole Des Sables (Senegal) with Germaine Acogny.