Spanning opera, film, theatre, and immersive tech, Kasia Głowicka works where emotion, precision, and experimentation collide. As a composer, she’s written VR operas that turn the metaverse into a stage, premiered works at the Venice Biennale and Warsaw Autumn, scored documentaries, and created genre-bending music-theatre for the Polish National Opera and Teatr Studio. Her sound — minimalist in form, cinematic in force — moves between intimate detail and widescreen imagination.
Beyond composing, Głowicka investigates how creativity shapes human connection and decision-making. She leads the Connected Creativity programme and serves as a researcher at the International Music Industry Lab at Inholland University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. She speaks and teaches on creativity, empathy, and the future of artistic practice, and is currently writing a book that brings these threads together.
Full biographySept 2026Fonds Podiumkunsten supports Cantata for Flesh and Code
Fonds Podiumkunsten has awarded a grant towards Cantata for Flesh and Code, a work for countertenor, AI voice, organ and electronics premiering in 2027.
The grant also covers Nobody’s Business, the podcast series developed alongside it, which looks at the hidden economics of making a living as an artist — what the work actually costs, and who absorbs that cost.
Aug 2026Selected for CHORNOBYL40
Głowicka is among the artists selected for CHORNOBYL40, the European project marking forty years since the disaster.
Selected participants take part in a research residency, after which a smaller group of projects will be produced and shown in a touring exhibition in Madrid, Berlin, Toulouse and Kyiv in 2027. The project is co-funded by the European Union and led from Kyiv.
Her proposal is a multichannel audio installation that begins with the iodine solution handed out across Poland in 1986 — and with what has grown back since.
Jul 2026Conference paper - Opera Decolonized: Listening to Afghan Women's Voices (Art of Research, Aalto 2026)
From Silencing to Listening: Opera-Installation as Cross-Cultural Medium for Afghan Women’s Voices
Paper presented at the Art of Research conference at Aalto University (2026)
Summary
Unknown, I Live With You (2018) was built around a problem: how do you bring clandestine writings by Afghan women into a Western artistic space without reproducing the very structures that silenced them? This paper, written as a member of The Airport Society collective, traces the formal decisions behind the opera-installation — venue, costume, casting, composition, audience placement, temporal structure — and argues that each one was an ethical choice as much as an artistic one.
At the heart of the argument is opera’s fundamental strength: a form where music, staging, dramaturgy, costume, and space are genuinely co-equal, demanding total presence from its audience. The paper asks whether that quality can be turned against opera’s own colonial tendencies — and whether a non-hierarchical working process, from democratic decision-making to shared yoga sessions before rehearsals, can mirror and reinforce what happens on the stage.
The paper will be presented at the Art of Research 2026 conference at Aalto University. It is currently available as a preprint on SocArXiv.
Links
Preprint: From Silencing to Listening — SocArXiv
Related links:
Unknown, I Live With You — OperaVision · Afghan Women’s Writing ProjectConference: https://events.aalto.fi/en/3X3IKxA7/g/82Z1zDshz8/art-of-research-2026-4a3bQtTRKz/overview
Citation
Głowicka, Kasia. 2026. “From Silencing to Listening: Opera-Installation as Cross-Cultural Medium for Afghan Women’s Voices.” Preprint. SocArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/m2hnq_v1.
Jun 2026Conference paper - The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI (CHIWORK
The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI
Paper presented at the Agency and Skill in Human-AI Interaction workshop, CHIWORK ’26 — the 5th Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work
Summary
Recent neuroscientific evidence is beginning to suggest that prompt-based interaction with large language models reduces brain connectivity and cognitive engagement compared to unaided creative work. For creative practitioners, this is not a peripheral concern — it points to a structural deskilling effect built into how generative AI tools are currently designed.
This paper proposes a practical concept for mitigating that effect: a model of two cognitive modes and three intersections between them, derived from my own compositional practice in algorithmic composition twenty years before generative AI tools became widely available. The framework identifies a single mechanism behind the deskilling effect of prompt-based systems — the elimination of transitions between cognitive modes — and argues that re-introducing those transitions is a teachable, practicable form of resistance.
The argument is grounded historically in Opalescence (2004/5), a piece for three female singers and electronics I composed during my practice-based PhD research at Queen’s University Belfast. At that time, working with algorithmic composition meant something categorically different from what “using AI” means today: there was no prompt field, no conversational layer. To get a system to produce material at all, one had to compose the system itself. Revisiting that practice from a 2026 vantage point makes visible what the prompt-response paradigm has eliminated: the transitions between modes of creative thinking that the cognitive science literature, from Wallas (1926) through to current neuroimaging studies, identifies as the site of creative skill development.
The paper closes with a provocation directed at the creative industry. The same analysis that applies to my own compositional practice applies, with local variation, to advertising, architecture, film, fashion, journalism, design, and the visual arts. What looks today like a productivity gain may, in this reading, be the accelerated obsolescence of an industry’s own workforce. The transition is the skill, and the work now is to make the space between modes inhabitable — in practice, in pedagogy, and eventually in the design of the tools themselves.
Links
Paper (workshop GitHub): Full text HERE
Workshop programme: https://agency-and-skill.github.io
Conference: https://chiwork.org/26/
Citation
Głowicka, K. The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI. 5th Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work, Agency and Skill in Human-AI Interaction Workshop, 2026. https://agency-and-skill.github.io/submissions/Glowicka\_2026\_Creative-Skill-and-Cognitive-Transitions-in-the-Age-of-Prompt-Based-AI\_CHIWORK.pdf
- 6 Oct 2026 · 16:30Presenting Connected Creativity @InHolland Open Access project, Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDSInholland Academy Amsterdam Sluisbuurt, Pina Bauschplein 4, 1095 PN Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 26 Nov 2026 · 18:00Presenting Decolonizing Opera @Art of Research Conference, Helsinki, FINLANDAalto University, Otakaari 1, 02150 Espoo, Finland
- 23 Jan 2027 · 18:15Try out Nobody's Business @ Studio ARTEk
