Sarah Hennies

Hennies was born in 1979, in Louisville, Kentucky. She began playing drums when she was nine years old, and as a teenager she started playing drums with local college punk rock bands.[2] She attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she studied under Stuart Saunders Smith, Herbert Brün, and William Moersch.[3][4] She then received a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied under Steven Schick.[5] Later, she moved to Ithaca, New York.[6][7][8]

After her graduation from UC San Diego, Hennies relocated to Austin, Texas, in 2003, and started collaborating with the guitarist Aaron Russell in the group Weird Weeds. In 2013, she founded her own record label, Weighter Recordings. Some of the musicians and ensembles with whom she has collaborated as a composer include Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, R. Andrew Lee, Talea Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire. She is also a member of the music trio Meridian.[6][9][7][10]

Hennies went through a gender transition in 2015 and much of her artwork reflects some aspects of her experience as a transgender woman.[6] Her audio-visual work Contralto was premiered in 2017, featuring transfeminine identity issues[6][11][12] and was nominated for the Queer|Art Prize in 2019.[13]

Hennies is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts (2016) and the Grants to Artists Award (2019) from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.[14] In 2022, she was one of 14 American composers to receive a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University.[15]