Mary Ellen Childs is a composer interested in all the senses: her works speak not only to the ears, but to the eyes, and even the nose. She writes for a variety of musical forces, including vocal ensembles, string quartet, solo accordion, concert band, and chamber groups of every ilk. She created numerous “visual percussion” pieces that embody the concept of music in motion, for her percussion ensemble CRASH. Her repertoire includes Click, a fast-paced, game-like work for three stick-wielding performers and DrumRoll, for four drummers on wheels. The Village Voice deemed Click “a newly born classic, like Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, only a thousand times more virtuosic.” Her work is influenced by place, sensory experience, architecture, and passages of time. She creates distinctive sound worlds, and often writes for specific architecture or environments. Stone Steel Wood Glass Light, commissioned for the Chicago Architectural Biennial, drew inspiration from the Farnsworth House, a glass house designed by Mies van der Rohe, where it was premiered to a series of small audiences. Her immersive installation NORTH is based on her time in the Arctic and considers our northernmost lands and their connection to all of us wherever we live. NORTH includes surround sound music, recorded by Zeitgeist; 4 channels of video projected onto textured surfaces, and a subtle scent she designed. Other full-length works include Dream House for string quartet (written for ETHEL) based on destruction and construction, accompanied by multi-image video of construction sites; and Wreck was created for dance (Black Label Movement), about a shipwreck on Lake Superior, for which she won a Sage Award. A gallery retrospective spanning nearly 40 years of work, titled “Music &…”, was exhibited at UW-LaCrosse in fall 2024 and included videos, projections, installations, sketch books, drawings, photographs, and musical instruments created expressly for her work. Over the last several years she has been building a body of work that combines music and scent, including her installation Aromusic, originally created for Proyecto ‘ace in Buenos Aires. Childs is a United States Artist Fellow, and has received grants and commissions from Kronos Quartet, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, Opera America, Other Minds, MAP, Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and Creative Capital. Residencies at Yaddo, Djeressi, Ucross (Alpert residency), Bellagio (Italy), Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Bogliasco (Italy), Camargo (BAU Fellow, France), Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice), and Nawat Fes in Morocco.