Eli Berman

Eli Berman is a Brooklyn-based vocalist, composer, producer, and sound artist originally from Pittsburgh, PA. A classically trained countertenor and baritone, her music weaves together extended vocal techniques and experimental electronics with Ashkenanzi Jewish cantorial prayer, Yiddish and Appalachian ballads, and western choral traditions. She builds and performs with custom “vocal feedback pipes”—amplified PVC and steel tubes rigged with animal hides, transducers, and effects pedals that transform her voice and generate resonant acoustic feedback. As a member of Kleztronica, a collective mixing house, techno, klezmer, and Jewish liturgical music, Eli creates club, ambient, and noise music entirely from processed vocal samples. 

 

Eli made her off-broadway debut in the 2025 Ars Nova ANT Festival, where she premiered her piece “GOLEMATRIARK” in collaboration with choreographer and performer Stuart B Meyers. Recognized with the 2025 David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence, Eli recently installed a new multimedia work “Deity of the Circle” at the University of Maryland with Armond Dorsey and Bonita Oliver. Eli also premiered “American Golem,” a multimedia collaboration with her parents Sue Powers and Jeff Berman, at Appalshop’s 2025 Seedtime on the Cumberland Festival (Whitesburg, KY). In July 2024, Eli curated, produced, and performed in “Kleztronica Presents: GOLEM,” a demonic klezmer puppet rave in Pittsburgh, PA, where experimental electronic musicians, puppeteers, actors, and scholars introduced audiences to Jewish mystical traditions. Eli music directed and performed in Anna Lublina’s show “Undying in Yidderland: Jargon Rituals” in the 2024 MADE.Festival at Stadttheater Gießen (Geißen, Germany) and in the 2023 premiere at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, Germany). Eli also opened the 2023 Snug Harbor Dance Festival (Staten Island, NY) in Bonita Oliver’s show “Trans Water Stories,” for which Eli built custom vocal feedback pipe sound sculptures. For the closing act of the 2022 Pop-Kultur Festival at Kulturbrauerei (Berlin, Germany), Eli performed an original track during the live premiere of Sanni Est's critically acclaimed album “PHOTOPHOBIA.” Eli has performed across North America and Europe at venues such as Atlantic Theater, National Sawdust, Morgan Library & Museum, Watermill Center, Neues Nationalgalerie (Berlin, DE), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, DE), Centro Cultural Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico City, MX), Banff Centre (Alberta, CA), the Monastery of Saint Martin Pinario (Santiago de Compostela, ES), Princeton University, Dartmouth College, the New School, University of Maryland, Yiddish Summer Weimar (Weimar, DE), New Music On the Point, New Explorative Oratorio Voice Festival, and Atlantic Music Festival. 

 

In addition to currently singing countertenor with the choir at Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Times Square and the St. Thomas Choir of Men and Boys on 5th Avenue, Eli has sung as a countertenor soloist in the 2018 U.S. premiere of John Tavener's Total Eclipse and in a 2018 New York Times-critically acclaimed concert of works by Eve Beglarian. Eli has presented at the 2025 Spirituality & the Arts Conference at Harvard Divinity School, 2021 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2020 Pan-American Vocology Association Symposium, and 2019 Transgender Singing Voice Conference. Eli holds an MA in Digital Musics from Dartmouth College and a BA in Music from Princeton University, where she graduated summa cum laude and was awarded the Edward T. Cone Memorial Prize for excellence in music performance, composition, and scholarship.