HELEN ANAHITA WILSON

Dr Helen Anahita Wilson FRSA is a practice-based transdisciplinary researcher at SOAS University of London and an award-winning composer, sound artist, pianist, and improviser. She is an alumna of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, University of Sussex, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and SOAS. 

Helen’s compositional practice brings together her research in South Asian musics with experiments in sonic life writing, corporeal acoustemology, and developments in biophilic and interspecies music making. Helen is the inaugural composer-in-residence at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London; an Oram Award winner for innovation in sound, music and related technologies; Spring 2024 spotlight artist for hcmf//; and is a new Women Make Music artist with PRS Foundation.

Her critically-acclaimed duo with tabla player Shahbaz Hussain is set to release a third album in 2025, building on the success of their first two releases on Golden Girl records and New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings. Their 2019 album DIWAN featured in numerous top 50 jazz albums of the year and Helen was subsequently named one of five international female jazz artists to make their mark globally by Mexico’s Gatopardo magazine. Helen has also released works via Platoon for Plant Vox: the world’s first biophilic, adaptogenic music project, as featured on Apple Music Wellbeing and Apple Music Fitness .

Her recent commissions include works for Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Brighton Dome & Festival, Brighton Pavilion and Museums, and Bloomsbury Festival. She also composes for museum installations and exhibitions, and for radio and podcast projects, providing sonic identities, audio branding, and sound design.

Helen has performed at venues including London’s Southbank centre (Purcell Room) and St Paul’s Cathedral (as musician-in-residence), and has toured extensively throughout Europe and India, including at major festivals. Alongside performing her own works, she is a regular commissioner of new music by fellow contemporary composers and she also presents the global classical and art music show, Stereophonica, on Repeater Radio. She is currently working on a new album of edible and toxic music made from the Solanaceae nightshade family of plants. Helen’s plant-derived music has been featured and supported by BBC Radio 4’s Today, BBC Radio 3’s The Essay and Saturday Morning with Tom Service, and New Scientist.

She has been supported by PRS Foundation, the Radiophonic Institute, Arts Council England, the Fund for Women Graduates, Help Musicians UK, and has recently been awarded the Francis Chagrin Composer Award by Sound and Music UK and a Thurston Dart Research Grant by the Royal Musical Association.

Helen has recently collaborated with Shahbaz Hussain, Talvin Singh OBE, Prathap Ramachandra, Debashish Bhattacharya, the Mysore Brothers, and visual artist Lisa Creagh. Upcoming projects include the launch of Corpora Collective in 2025, a composers’ and sound artists’ collective exploring understandings of the body through music and sonic arts, and the release of ‘Sound of Harris,’ an EP of songs and field recordings from the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. 

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Helen gratefully acknowledges support from PRS Foundation:

Also supported by: