Holly Herndon

Holly Herndon was born in 1980 In the USA and grew up in Johnson City, Tennessee. As a teenager, she spent several years in Berlin on a high school exchange program, where she immersed herself in the city’s vibrant dance and techno culture. Back in the U.S., she studied electronic music at Mills College in Oakland, learning from influential composers like John Bischoff and Fred Frith, and earned an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media. She then pursued a Ph.D. at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, where she focused on developing custom electronic instruments and vocal processing techniques using programming languages like Max/MSP.

Herndon’s work spans the realms of sound, technology, and identity. Her practice began in Berlin’s club scene, before shifting course when she moved to California to study at Mills College. There, she began exploring laptop performance as a serious compositional tool and developed a focus on the human voice in electronic music. This period led to her master’s thesis on embodied performance and the composition of a vocal ensemble piece titled 195. Since then, she has created a body of work that probes what it means to be human in an increasingly digitized world.

Herndon’s 2012 debut cassette Car and her first album Movement introduced her processed vocal soundscapes, music that blurs boundaries between pleasure and unease. Her 2019 album PROTO marked the debut of Spawn, a neural network trained on ensemble vocal sessions, and deepened her exploration of machine collaboration. Her digital twin Holly+, developed with longtime collaborator Mat Dryhurst, pushes this further: it allows others to process sound through her voice and is governed by a DAO that determines approved use. This structure gives Herndon partial control over her synthetic likeness and opens up collective governance as a model for artist rights in the age of AI. In 2022, she released a cover of Dolly Parton’s Jolene using Holly+, transforming a country classic into a digitally mediated performance that remains tethered to her vocal identity.

Touring across Europe and the U.S., performing at CTM Festival and opening for Radiohead in 2016, Herndon has steadily expanded her presence beyond the studio. In the art world, she contributed to Conrad Shawcross’ ADA installation at Palais de Tokyo and debuted her own gallery work in Everywhere and Nowhere, a 2015 exhibition at Hamburg’s Kunstverein that brought together multichannel sound, video, and live performance. For the 2024 Whitney Biennial, she and Dryhurst trained an AI model on images of her face, allowing visitors to generate and view works based entirely on that dataset. Herndon’s practice moves fluidly between media, consistently grounded in a deep engagement with technology and embodiment.