Eli Winter

Eli Winter is a composer, self-taught guitarist, essayist, and Houston native. His music synthesizes aspects of folk, rock, jazz, and devotional music, maintaining a waggish disregard for genre constraints emblematic of Chicago, his adopted hometown. Across six LPs and counting for labels like Three Lobed and American Dreams, the scope of his music has grown from guitar soli to include instrumental duets and bandleading. He’s collaborated with a wide range of artists live and on record, including Yasmin Williams, jaimie branch, Caroline Rose, David Grubbs, Cameron Knowler, Asher White and Ryley Walker, and leads a trio featuring Chicago musicians Sam Wagster (pedal steel guitar) and Tyler Damon (drums). His concert history spans prestigious music festivals like Primavera Sound and Big Ears, pristine listening rooms, museums, university chapels, laundromat bars, and small rooms in shotgun houses. In music and prose, Winter’s writing often considers subjects including memory, grief, endurance, literature, and trauma. He’s written about touring, literature, illness, and the lives of working artists for the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Economist, and others, and has often written liner notes for the American Dreams label. He is a 2025 Ucross Fellow in Music Composition and 2021 Luminarts Fellow in Creative Writing, was in residence at Ox-Bow in 2024 and Ragdale in 2022, and received the David Blair McLaughlin Prize in Nonfiction from the University of Chicago.