Bio
Cory Diane is a composer, performer, researcher, and sound artist who has made their home in New Orleans for nearly half of their life. Their transdisciplinary practice embraces both tradition and experimentation, rooted in the communities and movements with which they are in relationship. Their work spans improvisation, concert music, multimedia installation, creative technology, social practice, and long-term, multimodal collaborative research.
Since 2020, Diane has developed a body of work in solidarity with Rice’s whales - a species who, despite only recently being recognized by Western science, have existed in the Gulf of Mexico for millions of years. Their ongoing research connects these stories to broader environmental justice movements, communicating how profoundly these whales are threatened by the sounds of oil exploration that monopolize the Gulf’s acoustic space.
This work has taken the form of compositions, performances, installations, and collaborative research, with commissions and presentations nationally since 2023, including at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for the 50th Anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, the first-ever Gulf Whale Festival in Pensacola, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, and New Music on the Bayou. The project continues to evolve through various collaborations, most recently with the Whale Liberation Front (Imani Jacqueline Brown, Peter Johnson Bowling, and Cory Diane), whose installation Untitled, or They’ve Been Singing Since the Gulf Was Born was presented at UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of the Arts and Sciences in 2025 and will travel to the Oakland Museum in 2027. Diane is currently a 2026–2027 Greater Gulf Fellow at the Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast at Lamar University.
Since 2023, Diane has also been developing a project exploring the work of LIGO Livingston, a gravitational-wave observatory in Louisiana. Built to listen to the vibrations of the universe, LIGO first encounters the vibrational life of our planet - from the sounds of the observatory itself to the cumulative breath of waves lapping upon distant shores. These earthly vibrations constitute part of LIGO’s “noise budget,” disturbances to be filtered and muted in the search for signals from the cosmos. Diane’s research asks what lives in that noise, and what might be revealed by tuning in to what is tuned out. This inquiry connects gravitational-wave astronomy with ecological listening in the Mississippi River Delta, where the sounds of wildlife and waterways intermingle with the drones and rhythms of oil infrastructure. Supported through residencies with A Studio in the Woods, Antenna, and Jazz Generations Initiative (JGI) in 2025 and 2026, this work most recently culminated in a sound installation and concert presented by JGI, pairing Diane’s field recordings of the Delta with gravitational-wave data.
As a composer of contemporary classical music, Diane has written works for chamber ensembles including Ensemble Linea, Argento Ensemble, Bent Duo, and the Lang/Rainwater Duo, alongside performer-composer works developed for themself and collaborators. In 2022, they presented New Works for Piano, a concert featuring 45 minutes of solo, prepared, and ensemble piano music. In 2023, they were selected as a Harvard Fromm Fellow with the Composers Conference, and in 2026, they received Versipel New Music Ensemble’s commission at the Batture Contemporary Festival.
An active saxophonist, Diane performs with Wit’s End Brass Band and Hanoun Brass Band in New Orleans. They hold a B.A. in Music Studies from the University of New Orleans and an M.A. in Music Composition from Tulane University, and are currently pursuing a PhD in Experimental Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University.