Emily Bate is a singer, composer and songleader. She works fluidly across disciplines including music performance, theater and choral music. She founded and conducts a multi-city queer & trans community choral project called Trust Your Moves.
Projects include: Homo Economicus, a solo performance about remaking the economy; Wig Wag, a music-theater piece performed by a cast of 4 and the entire audience; and the “CSA,” a subscription art service that sends packages of interactive art to peoples’ home in the mail.
Recent collaborations include: performing in Pig Iron’s Poor Judge; the score for the film Queer Genius by Chet Pancake; several shows with frequent collaborator Erin Markey, including the anarcho-musical A Ride on the Irish Cream, featuring “accessible, often punchy pop-rock” (New York Times), and “soaring musical numbers” (Artforum) that were “startlingly gorgeous, and packed with heavenly harmonies” (New York Post); and a several composing collaborations with installation artist Patrick Costello.
Emily has worked with artists like Ragnar Kjartansson, MJ Kaufman, The Bearded Ladies Cabaret, and Pig Iron, in venues across the US and UK. She has recently performed at The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, The Wilma, The Guggenheim, Fabric Workshop Museum, Woolly Mammoth, and a construction and demolition recycling facility in Northeast Philadelphia.
Emily is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow, a 2022 Art Works Fellow and a 2021 Pew Fellow. Her work has also been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Independence Foundation, the Leeway Foundation, MAP Fund, and more.
Along with her co-composers on Rose: A True Story, she’s the recent winner of the Barrymore Award for Best Original Music in A Theater Production.