Elena Collins (she/her) is a clarinetist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist, based in Kansas City, Missouri where she is the Assistant Personnel Manager for the Kansas City Symphony. She completed her Master’s in clarinet performance at UMKC in the spring of 2024. As a clarinetist she focuses on promoting the world of new music by collaborating with composers and performers alike. She has attended multiple festivals, such as Bang on a Can summer festival, Cortona Sessions for New Music, Mostly Modern Festival, Wintergreen Music Festival, and Madeline Island Summer Music festival. Elena is an avid lover of chamber music and is the former clarinet player and co-founder of Full Gremlin Quartet, a mixed chamber ensemble based in KC. She is also a founder and organizer of Vice Versa, an interdisciplinary collective of artists who create improvisatory performances in a variety of venues across the U.S.

As a composer Elena’s music is motivated by themes of literature, nature, family, and loss. She is constantly inspired by philosophers, like Friedrich Nietzsche, and writers, like Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, and T.S. Eliot, often creating compositions interdisciplinary in nature with multiple layers of connectivity. Through the use of found sounds she records on her phone, Elena frequently creates fixed media that inspire her music or form a basis for her pieces. Elena’s music often looks at people and things indirectly through the fragments they leave behind.

Elena’s interdisciplinary artist side comes out in her compositions as well as her installations, events, and writings. In her undergraduate as a part of her Honor Scholar senior thesis, she curated a series of rooms dedicated to different philosophical themes, musical ideas, and literary concepts. Her thesis also focused on the creation of a weekend-long, school-wide festival called Art Walk. Elena loves planning, organizing, and creating events of this type and continues to do so in Kansas City.

Elena attended DePauw university for her undergraduate degree in clarinet performance. Her primary teachers have included Dr. Jane Carl, Candice Kiser, and Laura McLaughlin. In her free time, Elena loves playing with her cat Tigger, reading, and climbing, coaching, and setting at RoKC Climbing Gym.