Described as "striking" and "inventive" (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), composer and flutist KiMani (Key-Mahn-ee) Bridges is a dynamic artist whose expressive style and distinctive technique differentiates her in contemporary circles. KiMani’s music, colorful and personalized, explores a space where suspense, mystery, majesticness, and curiosity coexist. 

 

Most recently, the Louisville native has been commissioned, performed, and premiered by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Louisville Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and at Musaics of the Bay, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Festival of Faiths.

 

Bridges has performed at venues including Auer Hall at Indiana University, Bird Hall at the University of Louisville, and the Kentucky Center for the Arts. She has attended festivals including VIA Academy, Umoja Flute Institute, the Aria Music Festival, the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival, and Ensemble Evolution.

 

In 2019-20, she was awarded fellowships with Luna Composition Lab and bespoken (2021), high selective leadership programs that bring together the industry's most promising leaders in the country as well as the Loretto Project's Pathways Initiative Program. In addition, she was named a NextNotes High School Creator Award Winner of 2020 by the American Composers Forum, awarded the G. Schirmer Prize for her work "The Flower '' in 2020, and received an honorable mention from the 2022 ASCAP Morton Gould Composer Awards for her work "Healer".

 

Bridges earned her B.M. in composition with a flute concentration from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in 2024. KiMani will be pursuing her masters in composition as a proud recipient of a Kovner Fellowship at The Juilliard School.