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Growing up in the woods and blackberry thickets of Ithaca, NY, Adowyn Ernste is a multimedia artist whose projects span sound, image, and text. She works with a variety of mediums, including sound design, documentary/narrative/experimental film, sound and video installation, creative writing, music improvisation, composition, and graphic design. Blending narrative, poetic, and experimental modes, she aims to create works that are nostalgic yet eerie, quiet yet uncanny, and intricate yet dissonant. Her projects explore sound-driven relationships between sound and image, and often integrate archives and found media, music improvisation, video performance, time, light, memory, silence, and the natural world.
Graduating summa cum laude from Cornell's class of 2026, Adowyn studied experimental sound, film, and visual media as well as English, with minors in music, film, fine arts, and media studies. Her thesis project, "Endling," is an intermedia, multichannel sound and image piece made in answer to the noises, silences, and unanswered duetting calls of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, an extinct Hawaiian bird.
In her free time, Adowyn loves to spend time with her cats and her sister, and to escape human civilization in the woods and hills near her home.