About Nina Assimakopoulos

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.

About Nina’s Work

Award-winning flutist and interdisciplinary artist Nina Assimakopoulos creates works that move between performance, sound, and film. Her projects explore listening, landscape, and storytelling through collaborations, recordings, and moving image. Internationally recognized for expanding the sonic language and performance practices of the flute, she has premiered more than 125 new works and performed over 800 concerts worldwide. Alongside her creative work, she maintains an active career as a teacher and mentor to emerging musicians.