Born in 1979, Small is a multidisciplinary artist, singer, performer, photographer, and filmmaker, having been featured on Yo-Yo Ma's GRAMMY-winning 2017 "Best World Music Album".
As a child, Small was surrounded by music, writing, and psychoanalysis, with her parents being musicians, writers, and psychoanalysts. She spent her childhood playing the cello, creating gibberish sounds, improvising on the piano, dancing, fencing, and performing in musicals written by her mother.
Small became fascinated with photography at the age of thirteen and spent her high school years capturing images of her close friends, strangers, and her younger sister, Rachel, who has been her longtime muse.
After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design with a BA in photography in 2001, Small moved to Brooklyn the day before September 11th. She co-founded the vocal trio Black Sea Hotel in 2006, which has toured the US and Scandinavia and taught Balkan folk song internationally.
In 2011, Small created a 120-participant performative incarnation of her conceptual project, The Delirium Constructions, which combined Balkan vocal music, classical arias, and choral droning with historical and contemporary dress, synchronized facial gestures, and dance, as well as two legal marriage ceremonies conducted by Small.
In 2013, Small starred in the psychological thriller feature film "Butter on the Latch", directed by Josephine Decker, which premiered at the Berlinale. She was commissioned by HERE Arts Center's Prototype Festival in 2017 to premiere a staged work of her musical album, Secondary Dominance, which combined Tableaux, photography, moving image, dance, and singing with musical genres such as electronic, Balkan folk, industrial, pop, punk, rap, rock, and classical.
Small is currently working on a feature film of Secondary Dominance, a hybrid documentary/dance-centric music video exploring disentanglement from sexual trauma, set to release in Spring 2022. She has also completed her first two chamber works, "Behind the Gymnasium" and "Water in Our Eyes".
Small lives in Brooklyn with her two cats, Bunny and January, and is currently obsessed with learning ballroom Tango, Rumba, and Cha Cha.
