Experimental vocalist Carmina Escobar is a performer, improviser, sound and intermedia artist from Mexico City. Her work focuses primarily on sound, the voice, the body, and their interrelations to physical, social, and memory spaces. She is the co-founder, co-director and vocalist of LIMINAR.
Escobar has extensively explored the capacities of her voice, thereby developing a wide range of vocal techniques that she applies not only to her performance and creative practice but also to the investigation of radical ideas and concepts regarding the voice. She has studied vocal technique with diverse singers and vocalists, including Hebe Rosell, Jacqueline Bobak, Michiko Hirayama, Shelley Hirsh, Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, Juan Pablo Villa and Jaap Blonk. She was awarded the Performers Grant on two occasions by the National Fund for the Arts in Mexico. She has been an artist-in-residency at OMI Music (New York), STEIM (The Netherlands), Krakow Academy of the Electro-acoustic Music Studio (Poland), CANTE (center for the arts and new technologies) (Mexico), BINAURAL (Portugal), Guapamacátaro Art and Ecology Residency (Mexico), Montalvo Arts Center (California) and I-Park (Connecticut).
As a performer of contemporary music Escobar has specialized in repertoire for solo voice, the premieres of works by emerging and established composers and the realization of new operas involving experimentation, interdisciplinary collaborations, multimedia, and new technologies. She has performed and presented her own work in diverse festivals, biennials, experimental venues, formal concert halls and living rooms across the Mexican Republic, the USA, and Europe. Escobar resides in Los Angeles and is on the Voice Arts faculty at California Institute of the Arts.