Works
Sound • Film • Performance
At its spiritual and emotional core, however, Assimakopoulos’s The Legend of
Skywoman transcends all attempts at genre or form categorization… the piece is an
artful, kaleidoscopic sonic fusion of visionary narrative storytelling and ever-innovative
world flute and percussion-driven composition.
— The JW Vibe New Music Review
Works
My artistic practice moves across sound, performance, recording, and moving image. As a flutist and interdisciplinary artist, I create immersive, multi-genre performance experiences that range from concerts and recordings to interdisciplinary environments shaped by sound, place, story, and collaboration.
These experiences grow from curiosity, a deep love for nature, and a desire to meaningfully connect landscape, story, and people.
Film
My artistic practice moves across sound, performance, recording, and moving image. In recent years, my work has expanded into filmmaking, developing sound-driven cinema centered on listening, landscape, and storytelling.
Below is a sample of my first released film.
Lucid Dreams: The Lifecycle of an Artist
Lucid Dreams: The Lifecycle of an Artist (10 minutes; 2024) is a short experimental film exploring artistic loss and renewal. Shot entirely underwater in a 16-foot diving well, the work uses breath-held performance, fabric, and light to create a surreal visual landscape. The film has received multiple juried international screenings and awards.
Film Synopsis
Shot at the bottom of a 16-foot diving well, Lucid Dreams: The Lifecycle of an Artist (2024, 10 min.) follows a soul’s journey from the awakening of its artistic spirit, through the dark night of losing her voice, to rebirth as she emerges with a new, ancient voice.
Assimakopoulos served as videographer, director, primary performer, and producer, designing and installing more than 1,000 square feet of black fabric to create the underwater environment. Using natural breath-holding techniques, she captured scenes lasting up to two minutes.
The surreal visual landscape—featuring ink, fabric, and movement in water—evokes the universal search for self-discovery and artistic expression while reflecting the immersive art-making process that defines Assimakopoulos’s work as a multimedia creator.
Director Statement
Lucid Dreams: The Lifecycle of an Artist (2024, 10 min.) is a journey through the trials and transformations of artistic expression. Shot entirely underwater at the bottom of a 16-foot diving well, I served as videographer, director, primary performer, and producer. I designed and rigged more than 1,000 square feet of black fabric to create the submerged environment and used natural breath-holding techniques to capture scenes lasting up to two minutes, integrating the immersive art-making process that defines my work as a multimedia creator.
The isolation at the base of the pool became a space for deep introspection and creativity. The film emerged during a period in which an injury caused me to lose my performing voice as a flutist for nearly a year. That experience shaped the emotional core of the project.
In the film, viewers follow a soul from the awakening of her artistic spirit, through the dark night of losing her voice, to a rebirth in which she emerges with a new, ancient voice. Water becomes both environment and metaphor—its fluidity reflecting the passage of time and the depth of emotional experience.
The imagery of fabric and ink swirling through water—interwoven with moments of animation that suggest a shifting sense of time—serves as a metaphor for dissolution, transformation, and renewal. These visual elements create brief temporal dislocations, as if the viewer is moving between memory, dream, and present experience.
Awards and Screenings
Nina Assimakopoulos: Director/Producer/Cinematographer/Sound Track
Lucid Dreams: The Lifecycle of an Artist
Award Wins
• Picasso International Film Festival — Best Experimental Short Film
• Indo Global International Film Festival — Best Experimental Short Film
• Stockholm City Film Festival — Best Woman Filmmaker
• Cine Paris Film Festival — Best Artist Film, Short
• TRILOKA International Filmfare Awards — Best Trailer
• New World Film Festival — Best Cinematography
• Berlin Indie Film Festival — Best Editing
Honorable Mentions
• UK Film Awards
Official Selections
• New York Film & Cinematography Awards
• Filmmaker Sessions Volume 11
• First-Time Filmmaker Sessions Volume 12
• International Experimental Film Festival
• LA Film & Documentary Award
• International New York Film Festival
• GSF Awards – Global Short Film Awards
• Filmarte Short Film Festival
• Goa Short Film Festival
• Iconic Indie Film Awards
Performance
My performance work spans composition, improvisation, and interdisciplinary collaboration, often combining live music with movement, theater, visual elements, and immersive environments. As a flutist and interdisciplinary artist, I create multi-genre performances that bring together sound, story, and place through collaborations with dancers, filmmakers, visual artists, and composers.
Below are examples of recent projects.
The Legend of SkyWoman
The Legend of SkyWoman (26 minutes; 2023) is a multimedia theatrical work and musical homage to medicine traditions from the Americas. The work received the 2023 Global Music Awards® Bronze Medal in Experimental Music. Read more in the Artist Statement.
The Legend of SkyWoman Artist Statement
The Legend of SkyWoman (26 minutes; 2023) is a multimedia musical tone poem for narrator, global flutes and percussion, and fixed-media soundscape composed by Nina Assimakopoulos.
The piece invites the listener on a journey through multidimensional soundscapes that weave the story of a sky being who spins songs from wind and ice and gifts them to the land below. When SkyWoman hears the sounds rising from the earth, she falls through a hole in the sky in search of them. During her journey she undergoes a transformation that causes her to lose her voice and songs. She ultimately regains them when she is gifted a flute made from a lightning-struck tree and discovers what she seeks: a Song Magic that merges sorrow and joy and joins the sounds of heaven and earth.
The fixed-media soundscape incorporates layered global percussion, breath and voice, and flutes made from wood, silver, and clay. Additional instruments were created by Nina Assimakopoulos from organic materials collected from rivers and forests in West Virginia, USA.
Artist Biography
Nina Assimakopoulos is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning flutist, interdisciplinary performing artist, and experimental music composer. Her work includes traditional and contemporary flute performance, eco-performance concerts, immersive sound environments created from environmental field recordings, and solo recordings and album releases shaped by cultural perspectives, environmental themes, oral storytelling, mythology, and diverse wisdom traditions. In recent years, her creative practice has expanded into filmmaking, where she develops sound-driven cinema centered on listening, landscape, and storytelling.
Her first publicly released film, Lucid Dreams: The Lifecycle of an Artist, received 19 international jury selections and multiple festival awards, including Best Art Film (Cine Paris Film Festival, 2025), Best Woman Filmmaker (Stockholm City Film Festival, 2024), and Best Experimental Film (Picasso International Film Festival, 2025).
She is internationally regarded as a leading innovator in contemporary flute performance and is distinguished for expanding the sonic language and performance practices of the instrument. Her work includes more than 125 new music commissions and world premiere performances, over 800 national and international solo concerts, workshops, and masterclasses, and the release of nine solo albums.
Her recordings have received international recognition, including the 2023 Global Music Awards® Silver Medal Outstanding Achievement Award and the Music and Stars Awards® Best Instrumentalist Silver Medal Award for Bending Light: Sonic Prisms for Solo Flute (AMP Recordings, 2023), as well as the 2024 World Flute Society Award for Best Solo Native American Recording for Sonic Bloom: Breath • Branch • Song (2024).
Assimakopoulos’s site-specific sonic installations, multimedia performances, and community workshops invite participants to deepen awareness of and connection to their sonic environments and demonstrate the role artists can play in environmental and cultural expression. Her compositions and sound art experiences often incorporate global flutes, instruments she crafts from organic materials, visual media, choreography, and layered field recordings to engage audiences with themes of environment, culture, and nature.
A recent example of this work is her multimedia tone poem The Legend of SkyWoman (26 minutes; 2023), a musical homage to medicine traditions from North, Central, and South America. The work incorporates a fixed-media, multi-layered soundscape created from West Virginia environmental field recordings, instruments made from regional organic materials, and global flutes and percussion, and received the 2023 Global Music Awards® Bronze Medal in Experimental Music.
Assimakopoulos was honored in 2024 with the Benedum Distinguished Scholars Award at West Virginia University and has received international grants and recognition from organizations including the Aaron Copland Fund, the Fulbright Commission, the Puffin Foundation and the National Society of Arts and Letters. She tours extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America as a performing artist and masterclass presenter.
She is Professor of Flute at the College of Creative Arts and Media at West Virginia University and an avid white-water kayaker with a deep commitment to forest and river conservancy.
A Curved World
A Curved World (27 minutes; 2024) is a theatrical work for narrator, modular ensemble, organic and global instruments, and flutes I craft from repurposed West Virginia wood.
Read more in the Artist Statement.
A Curved World Artist Statement
A Curved World (27 min; 2024) is a work for narrator, modular ensemble, organic and global instruments, and flutes made from repurposed West Virginia wood that I craft myself. I wrote both the text and the musical score for the piece. The work was inspired by a personal encounter with a piece of driftwood I discovered along a riverbank of the New River. What at first appeared to be a simple fragment of wood revealed a remarkable history: it was the trunk of a dwarf eastern red cedar, approximately forty-five years old, that had traveled nearly 150 miles through the watershed before arriving at the place where I found it.
Imagining the journey of this tree became the central poetic impulse of the work. Once rooted and reaching toward the sky, the cedar eventually fell into the river and began a long passage through currents and floods, moving from eddy to eddy, at times floating freely, at times caught deep beneath stones or lodged in ice and along the banks. Over years, perhaps decades, it traveled alongside other remnants of the forest: branches, animal remains, and the quiet migrations of the river itself.
In A Curved World, this imagined journey becomes a sonic landscape. The narrator gives voice to the story of the tree’s passage through water and time, while the ensemble creates an environment of shifting currents and resonances. Large percussion instruments made from driftwood, together with flutes carved from foraged Appalachian wood, become both instrument and symbol: wood that once reached toward the sky now sings its stories through sound.
At the heart of the work is a transformation. The driftwood, shaped by water, time, and chance, moves through a kind of hero’s journey, encountering adventure, darkness, and renewal. Eventually it is found by a songstress and reborn as a flute. Through sound, the journey continues: from wind and earth to river, from river to breath, and rising in song once again toward the sky.
Artist Biography
Nina Assimakopoulos is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning flutist, interdisciplinary performing artist, and experimental music composer. Her work includes traditional and contemporary flute performance, eco-performance concerts, immersive sound environments created from environmental field recordings, and solo recordings and album releases shaped by cultural perspectives, environmental themes, oral storytelling, mythology, and diverse wisdom traditions. In recent years, her creative practice has expanded into filmmaking, where she develops sound-driven cinema centered on listening, landscape, and storytelling.
Her first publicly released film, Lucid Dreams: The Lifecycle of an Artist, received 19 international jury selections and multiple festival awards, including Best Art Film (Cine Paris Film Festival, 2025), Best Woman Filmmaker (Stockholm City Film Festival, 2024), and Best Experimental Film (Picasso International Film Festival, 2025).
She is internationally regarded as a leading innovator in contemporary flute performance and is distinguished for expanding the sonic language and performance practices of the instrument. Her work includes more than 125 new music commissions and world premiere performances, over 800 national and international solo concerts, workshops, and masterclasses, and the release of nine solo albums.
Her recordings have received international recognition, including the 2023 Global Music Awards ® Silver Medal Outstanding Achievement Award and the Music and Stars Awards® Best Instrumentalist Silver Medal Award for Bending Light: Sonic Prisms for Solo Flute (AMP Recordings, 2023), as well as the 2024 World Flute Society Award for Best Solo Native American Recording for Sonic Bloom: Breath • Branch • Song (2024).
Assimakopoulos’s site-specific sonic installations, multimedia performances, and community workshops invite participants to deepen awareness of and connection to their sonic environments and demonstrate the role artists can play in environmental and cultural expression. Her compositions and sound art experiences often incorporate global flutes, instruments she crafts from organic materials, visual media, choreography, and layered field recordings to engage audiences with themes of environment, culture, and nature.
A recent example of this work is her multimedia tone poem The Legend of SkyWoman (26 minutes; 2023), a musical homage to medicine traditions from North, Central, and South America. The work incorporates a fixed-media, multi-layered soundscape created from West Virginia environmental field recordings, instruments made from regional organic materials, and global flutes and percussion, and received the 2023 Global Music Awards ® Bronze Medal in Experimental Music.
Assimakopoulos was honored in 2024 with the Benedum Distinguished Scholars Award at West Virginia University and has received international grants and recognition from organizations including the Aaron Copland Fund, the Fulbright Commission, the Puffin Foundation and the National Society of Arts and Letters. She tours extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America as a performing artist and masterclass presenter.
She is Professor of Flute at the College of Creative Arts and Media at West Virginia University and an avid white-water kayaker with a deep commitment to forest and river conservancy.
Explore additional live and recorded performances:
Explore some of my paintings:
Isaac, Schlafend, 2005
Oil and Tempera on Panel, 16 x2 4
Ileana, Untitled I, 2006
Oil and Tempera on Wood 26 x 38
recordings
My recordings span traditional Western repertoire, contemporary music, extended techniques, and performances on self-crafted wooden flutes, including works I have composed for these instruments. I have released nine albums and received four international recording awards. I deeply enjoy working in the recording studio! It’s where deep focus, collaboration, and sound design come alive for me as vibrant creative forces.
Select an album cover to listen.
Explore additional live and recorded performances:
Flutist Biography
Internationally acclaimed flutist Nina Assimakopoulos is regarded as a leading voice in flute performance whose work spans traditional concert repertoire and contemporary innovation. An award-winning performing artist, she is distinguished for expanding the sonic and performance language of the instrument through both traditional and exploratory forms of performance. Her projects combine flute music with movement, multimedia arts, and, more recently, eco-performance practices that integrate Indigenous-style world flutes made from repurposed wood and instruments crafted from organic Appalachian materials with narration and storytelling.
Her career includes more than 125 new music commissions and world premiere performances, the release of nine solo albums, and over 800 national and international solo concerts, workshops, and masterclasses.
Her recordings have received international recognition, including the 2023 Global Music® Silver Medal for Outstanding Achievement (Instrumentalist) and the Music and Stars Awards® Silver Medal for Best Instrumentalist across all genres (Bending Light: Sonic Prisms for Solo Flute, AMP Recordings, 2023), the 2024 World Flute Society Award for Best Solo Native American Recording, and selection into the first round of the Grammy® nominations for Best Classical Instrumental Solo (Vāyu: Multi-Cultural Flute Solos from the Twenty-First Century, AMP Recordings, 2015).
Assimakopoulos has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America as a performing artist and masterclass presenter. Her solo recital appearances span international music festivals and major venues worldwide, including Carnegie Hall, the Alden Theatre Rising Stars Concert Series, the Dame Myra Hess Radio Broadcast Concert Series, and the Live from Hochstein Radio Broadcast Series.
She has also performed as an orchestral musician with ensembles including the Munich City Opera, the Bavarian Academy Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, among others.
She is the recipient of numerous international grants and awards from organizations including the Aaron Copland Fund, the Fulbright Commission, the National Society of Arts and Letters, the Puffin Foundation, NY Women Composers, and the Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now Foundation. She was honored in 2024 with the West Virginia University Benedum Distinguished Scholars Award.
Assimakopoulos is Professor of Flute at West Virginia University’s College of Creative Arts and Media, where she enjoys working with artists across disciplines and mentoring the next generation of flutists and educators.
She studied with renowned solo and orchestral musicians Peter Lloyd at the Indiana University School of Music and Paul Meisen at the Academy for Music and Theater in Munich, Germany.
Beyond her professional life, she is an avid white-water kayaker with a deep passion for Appalachian river and forest conservancy.
Current Projects
Current projects include the recording of a new album inside a lava tube at Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, exploring the acoustic relationship between landscape, resonance, and sound. I will return to Hawaiʻi in Spring 2026 to complete this recording!
I am also developing my first feature-length hybrid documentary film, currently titled The New, which builds on my work across sound, performance, and moving image while drawing on approaches from sensory ethnography. Alongside the film, I am developing Appalachian Story Map, an interdisciplinary project that brings together film, oral history, and collaborative storytelling with West Virginia communities, inspired by story cloth and Indigenous mapping traditions.
Selected images from current projects The New Film and Appalachian Story Map.
