Shanna Pranaitis
Sound has always been my way of asking questions.
Not just musical questions, but human ones.
Questions about perception, imagination, communication, risk, curiosity, and what becomes possible when we move beyond the familiar.
Those questions shape the music I choose, the collaborations I enter, and the kinds of experiences I want to create.
I’m drawn to experimentation and to the ways sound can shift attention and perception, changing how we experience a moment.
Whether I’m performing newly commissioned works, interpreting graphic scores, collaborating across disciplines, or helping shape new repertoire for the flute, I want the work to invite deeper listening, greater imagination, and new ways of understanding ourselves, one another, and the world around us.
For Those Who Like the Longer story
Shanna is a radically traditional flutist and unabashed sound explorer whose work is driven by a fascination with how sound changes attention, perception, and relationship.
She is drawn to music that takes risks, resists easy answers, and asks performers and audiences to listen with greater curiosity.
A contemporary flute specialist, she creates immersive artistic experiences through newly commissioned and historically reimagined music, improvisation, electronics, movement, graphic scores, storytelling, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
That curiosity has led to collaborations with composers, poets, movement artists, visual artists, and performers around the world, and to performances on five continents. Her work has been presented at festivals including Gaudeamus Muziekweek and Darmstädter Ferienkurse, and in venues ranging from experimental performance spaces to Carnegie Hall and the Tonhalle Zürich.
Beyond her performance work, Shanna has spent much of her career building communities and creating pathways for artistic exploration. She is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of FluteXpansions, a virtual platform dedicated to the frontier of contemporary flute performance and composition. Through educational programs, artistic collaborations, and workshops, she helps cultivate an international community of adventurous performers, composers, and sonic explorers.
Her recording projects are driven by the same spirit of curiosity that shapes her performance work. Her debut solo album of works by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf was hailed as a "virtuoso testimony" (Musicalifeiten) and features world premiere recordings written specifically for her. Her growing discography continues to explore new possibilities for flute, electronics, chamber music, and low flutes.
Throughout her career, Shanna has been drawn to projects that challenge assumptions and expand artistic possibilities. She was a founding member and Development Director of Ensemble Dal Niente during its formative years, later co-founded the transatlantic ensembles Sonic Hedgehog and Collect/Project, and formed the duo Memoria Nova with pianist Andrew Rosenblum to explore experimental, interdisciplinary, and boundary-crossing repertoire.
A passionate advocate for artists and voices outside the mainstream, Shanna co-curated and co-organized the Galina Ustvolskaya Festival: Power In Sound (2017), a multi-day festival devoted to the music of Galina Ustvolskaya that helped bring renewed attention to one of the twentieth century's most singular artistic voices.
Committed to forging her own path as an artist, Shanna pursued extended private study with Matthias Ziegler in Switzerland following degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. Along the way she has been shaped by a remarkable lineage of teachers, mentors, collaborators, and artistic influences whose impact continues to inform her work, including her formative training with Monty Adams and Dolores Humberg.
Shanna performs on instruments designed to expand the expressive possibilities of the flute itself, including a Burkart C-flute and open-hole piccolo, Kingma open-hole bass and alto flutes, and an Abell/Kingma system wood C-flute.