Lawson White is an artist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist whose work spans ambient, electronic, and chamber music. Working with voice, pedal steel, analog synthesizers, percussion, and live electronics, he makes music for bodies, rooms, and records — moving fluidly between written composition and real-time improvisation, and increasingly beyond music alone, into work created with dancers, choreographers, filmmakers, and visual artists.

His current focus is live, improvised performance: responding in the moment to a dancer, a film, or a room, and shaping sound as it unfolds — soundscapes that become environments, with space left for the listener as the main character. In September 2026 he gave the solo premiere of The Living Array, a new work created for the opening of Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman at the Frist Art Museum.

This way of working grows out of an unusually wide musical life. A founding member of Alarm Will Sound and a former member of Sō Percussion, he has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Kennedy Center. Lawson has collaborated with choreographers including Merce Cunningham, Shen Wei, and Eliot Feld, and with artists across contemporary classical and experimental music — among them Steve Reich, David Lang, John Zorn, Bryce Dessner (The National), Zeena Parkins (Björk), Matmos, Kronos Quartet, yMusic, and the Metropolitan Opera. He performs regularly with the Nashville Symphony. He teaches percussion at Belmont University.

As a producer and engineer — and a singer and player on much of what he makes — he has worked on multiple GRAMMY-nominated and -winning recordings, with artists including Jamie xx, Twenty One Pilots, Turnstile, Brittany Howard, Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Ben Folds, Shara Nova (My Brightest Diamond), Shakira, and Béla Fleck. He works from The Parlor, his studio on Music Row in Nashville.

He holds an MM from the Yale School of Music and a BM and Performer's Certificate from the Eastman School of Music.