Few artists move as fluidly between music and visual art as Hildur Elísa Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic composer and artist born in 1993. Her work often inhabits the space between installation, performance, and sound, using these forms to consider how people experience their surroundings, habits, and the invisible emotional threads running through daily interactions. Rooted in both Reykjavík and Amsterdam, her projects regularly cross borders and disciplinary boundaries.
From clarinet to conceptual performance
Hildur Elísa’s musical foundation began with classical clarinet studies at the Reykjavík College of Music, earning a diploma in 2015. She continued her education at Iceland University of the Arts, graduating in 2019 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. An exchange period at Hochschule Luzern further broadened her perspective. By 2024, she had completed advanced opera studies at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, focusing on contemporary approaches to music and performance.
Her career has traced innovative territory, regularly reframing actions or sounds that might go unnoticed, such as the gestures of office life or the act of listening, through operatic or musical settings. Her explorations have touched on themes like grief, absence, and the unique ways people tune in to one another and to the spaces they inhabit.
Performances across continents
Hildur Elísa’s compositions and performances have appeared in both cultural capitals and quieter corners. In 2023, her work “her immeasurable soul” was brought to life by recorder player Juho Myllylä at major music festivals in the Netherlands, including Grachtenfestival, Gaudeamus, and November Music. That same year, she presented “Seeking Solace,” a piece examining the tensions between workplace roles and personal struggle, in Iceland’s Outvert Art Space in Ísafjörður. Later, a video adaptation and live version appeared at the Tokyo Biennale.
2024 saw her operatic series “fanfare”, inspired by city transport sounds and the inner restlessness of urban living, performed in Rotterdam, Kópavogur, Amsterdam, and Groningen. A group exhibition at The Living Art Museum in Reykjavík featured her piece “addolorato,” accompanied by a performance of “ULTRADOLENTE” for ensemble. She opened a solo exhibition of “Seeking Solace” in Kópavogur’s Y Gallery in August of that year.
Recognition from the Icelandic arts community soon followed. She was awarded the Motivational Award at the Icelandic Arts Prize in 2026 for her depth of vision and mature handling of complex emotions within her work. A shortlisting by the Royal Arts Academy and support from the Iceland Artists’ Salary Fund and Mondriaan Fonds in 2025 underscored her growing international profile.
Recent projects reflect Hildur Elísa’s ongoing fascination with the boundaries between public routine and private feeling. “the gospels” imagines an operatic card game for bold, outspoken women. “Popsicle’s Lament” captures the fleeting sorrow of a lullaby for a melting popsicle, while earlier pieces have seated silent performers among orchestras or submerged the human figure in a swimming pool, challenging audiences to notice what is not said as much as what is heard.
