06/05/2026
As part of RITUAL this weekend, Leila Alexander will be giving a performance at 2pm on Saturday 9th May, so please join us then for a chance to experience her beautiful voice, and her unique response to the artworks on show in the gallery.
Leila Alexander is a New Zealand–born multidisciplinary artist working across voice, movement, and immersive media. Her practice explores the psychosomatic impact of sound on the body, examining how resonance, composition, and narrative generate shared physiological response between performer and audience, often operating at the threshold between intimacy and voyeurism.
Drawing on professional experience across opera, dance, and screen performance, she reworks canonical forms through immersive and site-responsive contexts, treating the voice as both instrument and site. Her flagship work LUCIA, a virtual reality live opera performance, reimagines the ‘mad scene’ from Lucia di Lammermoor, challenging historic portrayals of female madness within the operatic canon.
Alexander has performed internationally within contemporary artworks, including at the Venice Biennale in Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy for Two Ancestors, alongside performances in Lee Mingwei’s The Art of Participation: Sonic Blossom and Dom Bouffard’s [Un]Expected Witnesses.
Alongside her contemporary art practice, she maintains an active operatic career, having performed at Wigmore Hall and Royal Albert Hall, and most recently appeared as Musetta in La Bohème with Regents Opera and in the title role of Dark Lady of the Sonnets for the Shakespeare in Music Festival, of which she is Artistic Associate.
She trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, was selected for the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation programme, and previously practised as a barrister and solicitor specialising in media law, intellectual property, and commercial litigation, experiences which continue to inform the conceptual and structural frameworks of her work.
