Silen Wellington (they/he) is a sculptor of sound, artist of people, witch, genderqueer shapeshifter, mercurial story collector, and lover, among other things. Avidly interdisciplinary, they like to combine music with other art mediums, be that spoken word, visual art, ritual performance, loud and fiery eye contact, otherworldly and melting trysts, or something else entirely.
Their work has been performed in gardens whispering delightful fae dances to the trans-ancestors that escape definition. Their work has featured boys in dresses next to saxophones, prescription label collages amid chaotic soundscapes of dysphoria, nonbinary shadow puppets behind sheets of rainbow light, and intramuscular testosterone injections under expansive life-giving harmonics. It has screamed at the onslaught of xenophobic news, granulated recordings of politicians, and pleaded with white people to recognize the racialized violence of our culture. Silen’s art is never enough.
They have a BM in Music Composition and a BA in Psychology from University of Colorado Boulder (along with a handful of certificates and minors). They were a 2022 Bouman Fellow with the composer collective Kinds of Kings, a 2022 Boulder Arts Commission recipient, and a 2022-2023 American Opera Initiative fellow with the Kennedy Center in Washington DC for their opera What the Spirits Show, libretto by Walken Schweigert. In 2019, they were the SEAMUS Allen Strange Award recipient and during their time at CU, they won the Undergraduate Composition Award, Spark Electroacoustic award, Undergraduate Research Funding, LGBT Wolfson Writing Prize, and various scholarships. Internationally performed from Hyderabad, India to Invercargill, Aotearoa New Zealand, they have collaborated with ensembles & organizations such as Ars Nova Singers, Denver’s Playground Ensemble, Resonance Women’s Chorus, and Phoenix: Colorado’s Trans Community Choir, Luster Productions, Control Group Productions, and Minneapolis' Open Flame Theatre. They have participated in residencies and festivals such as Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Connecticut Summerfest. They have studied composition with Patricia Burge, John Drumheller, Daniel Kellogg, Carter Pann, and Nathan Hall. Silen’s piano teachers include Ash Jaeger, Patricia Burge, Doris Lehnert, and Jennifer Hayghe.
Silen is a white settler of Norwegian & French descent living on Cheyenne, Arapaho & Ute lands seeking to unsettle himself & practice awareness and humility, listening to develop right relationship with the land & advocate for racial justice. A lover of thresholds, Silen is transgender & queer experiencing varying degrees of (quasi-spiritual) madness sometimes self-labeled as neurodivergent and is otherwise abled.
Besides music, Silen writes poetry, prose, and creative nonfiction and has received numerous prizes for their work, often weaving poetry and ritual into their performance art. They are the 2021 winner of the Paul G. Quinnett Lived Experience Essay Competition hosted by the American Association of Suicidology, and have been published in second edition of Trans Bodies, Trans Selves and the literary journal Impossible Archetype.
Outside of the arts world, they direct a nonprofit in Northern Colorado called the Yarrow Collective, offering peer support run by people with lived experience of mental health and/or substance use struggles. In all aspects of their life, they aim to create spaces where people feel safer to come closer to their authentic selves.