About Emily
Flutist and producer Emily Duncan is an electrifying, theatrical artist creating new performance experiences that live at the intersection of music, technology, literature, and art. As a contemporary specialist who loves the “weird” side of the flute, 95% of the music she performs is spooky but only 5% of it is written by dead people. She has worked with David Lang, Thomas Adés, Nathalie Joachim, and Nadia Sirota, performed with Lizzo at the 2023 Met Gala, and has toured with the bands Hawthorne Heights, Escape the Fate, and The Spill Canvas. Her debut album, Woolf at the Door, released on Neuma Records in July 2025. Along with dozens of composers across multiple musical genres, she is currently embarking on a lifelong project to commission flute pieces for each work in Edgar Allan Poe’s canon.
Her Shirley Jackson flute opera Easy Baby, a collaboration with composer Catherine Brookman and writer/director Jen Pitt was a 2026 OPERA America Discovery Grant and Brooklyn Arts Council awardee. The project will have a workshop showing at the Center for Performance Research in spring 2027.
Emily is one-half of the voice, flute, and electronics duo BHED, together with vocalist Britt Hewitt. The duo launched in 2025 through a collaboration with composer Randall Woolf, premiering three reimagined semi-staged works for voice, flute, and electronics at Nancy Manocherian's the cell theatre in New York City. Their projects prioritize experimentation, play, and imaginative frameworks. PULL, a cycle of miniature pieces written for each of the 78 cards in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck and performed for an audience of one. As their Tarot was read, each card was orchestrated in real time, creating an original piece of music for that one audience member alone to ever hear. BHED is currently developing an evening-length staged work based on the 1922 manual Etiquette by Emily Post. The piece interrogates the daily mundane theatrics of manners and ritual by recontextualizing them through a surreal performance lens.
In 2022, Emily founded the web app GigCrunch to help freelance artists take back control of their finances and ensure they are being paid fairly. Emily is a graduate of The University of Iowa and The Juilliard School. To keep up with her projects, please visit https://www.rebelflute.com/.