Katinka Kleijn, Cellist

Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has cultivated an exploratory, interactive practice at the intersection of improvisation, composition and performance art.
A featured VIP contemporary artist at EXPO Chicago, Kleijn performed her feminist work Scratching in April 2025. In October 2025, The Momentary at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, will showcase her site-specific audiovisual installation, utilizing the museum’s 80-foot-tall LED tower.

Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised work Water On the Bridge. Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) similarly probes the parallels between human and cello bodies through a shared-circuit synth. Her collaborations with performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves, which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.” Kleijn’s situation-based composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), was presented by Ensemble Dal Niente at Big Ears Festival.performance art
A member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Kleijn has presented solo multimedia shows at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Her recordings include Dai Fukijura’s Cello Concerto with ICE, David Baker’s Cello Concerto with the Chicago Sinfonietta, and an avant-folk record on Drag City with guitarist Bill MacKay.