Sasha Leitman is a sound artist, composer, inventor and creative technologist from California, currently living in Aotearoa New Zealand. She has been making musical instruments, new interfaces for musical expression and sound art installations for the last 20 years. Her work is rooted in the belief that music is a fundamentally physical activity and often features elements of DIY craftsmanship, materiality, underwater sound, field recordings and found objects. After spending over a decade teaching courses and managing the Max Lab – an Interface Prototyping Lab, at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), she decided it was time to try out the other side of the Pacific. She has just submitted a thesis for the PhD program in Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand where she explored the design of computer music controllers inspired by auditory resonance and the nuanced control of acoustic instruments. In 2024, she will be lecturing at CCRMA again.

“Sasha has an enormous wealth of knowledge about designing electronic music projects, including microcontroller platforms, sensors, actuators, circuitry, software, mechanical design, materials, and lots more. And she’s very down-to-earth, helpful and approachable, which students appreciate.

– Roger Linn, with whom Sasha co-teaches a annual one-week workshop in designing musical instruments at Standard’s CCRMA”