Dr. Paul Rudy

A man with a bald head, glasses, and a long goatee sitting cross-legged on a black surface. He is wearing a dark sweater with a decorated arm and appears to be in a contemplative moment. Several singing bowls of different sizes and colors are placed around him, with a mallet resting on one of the bowls.

Dr. Paul Rudy: American Academy in Rome (2011), Guggenheim (2008) and Fulbright Fellow (1997). Photo by Susan Wolfe and rattle by Something Sally Art.

Mission Statement

My mission is to cultivate harmonic intelligence: a way of tuning human awareness while staying tethered to Mother Earth, allowing us to explore the larger cosmic field through embodiment. I create sound-based, sensory, and ecological experiences that support resonance, presence, and coherence in individuals and communities. Through music, sound practice, teaching, and collaborative artworks, I invite deep listening and participation in life as a shared, living system.

Life is a creative prayer

Presence itself is prayer. When attention rests fully in the body, on the land, and in the moment at hand, something essential is already offered. My creative life arises from the understanding that imagination, sound, and making are not separate from prayer, but amplify it. Presence becomes embodied experience.

Intellect is my superpower, but intellect alone cannot hold the fullness of experience. Over decades of working with sound, land, and community, whether on stage, in the studio, with clients, or on my land in northeast Kansas, listening has become devotion. Sound isn’t something we merely hear; it is something we become through attention.

Living on land shaped by prairie and woods, I work with both physical and subtle energies, weaving them into sound, space, ritual, and daily life. Each act of creation from composing, to building, tending, or gathering, becomes a way of amplifying presence. These are creative prayers that do not seek answers but invite better questions through deeper relationship with the living world.

Close-up of soap bubbles creating a shimmering, iridescent pattern.

Artist Statement

My work explores sound as a medium for presence, perception, and relationship. I create performances, installations, sound-based rituals, and participatory listening environments that invite people to slow down, sense more fully, and engage with sound as a living field rather than a fixed, captured object.

Listening is central to my practice as an active, embodied form of participation. Through carefully crafted sonic architectures, listeners become co-creators, choosing how meaning emerges through attention. Rather than prescribing interpretation, I design conditions in which resonance, memory, and awareness arise organically.

My practice spans composed music, sound healing, land-based work, and collaborative projects that integrate ecology, community, and care. I am particularly interested in how sound operates across different scales of time — from the immediacy of breath and gesture to seasonal, ecological, and cosmic rhythms across past, present, and future. Whether working in concert halls, galleries, care centers, or outdoor environments, I treat sound as connective tissue between body, place, and imagination.

Ultimately, my work dissolves the boundary between art and life. Sound becomes a way of cultivating harmonic intelligence: an embodied capacity to sense coherence, navigate complexity, and remain present within a shared, living system.

I love to make things

100 word bio

Paul Rudy is a composer, sound artist, and educator whose work explores sound as a medium for presence, perception, and relationship. He creates performances, installations, and participatory listening environments that invite embodied attention and shared meaning. His practice spans composed music, sound healing, land-based work, and collaborative projects integrating ecology, community, and care. Central to his work is the cultivation of harmonic intelligence: an embodied capacity to sense coherence and remain present within a shared, living system. Based in the Kansas City region, Rudy works across concert halls, galleries, care centers, and outdoor environments, dissolving the boundary between art and life through sound.

250 word bio

Paul Rudy is a composer, sound artist, and educator whose work explores sound as a medium for presence, perception, and relationship. His practice spans composed music, sound-based installations, participatory listening environments, sound healing, and land-based projects that integrate ecology, community, and care. Across these contexts, Rudy invites listening as an embodied, active process through which meaning emerges rather than being prescribed.

Central to his work is the cultivation of what he calls harmonic intelligence: an embodied capacity to sense coherence, navigate complexity, and remain present within a shared, living system. His projects often emphasize agency and participation, allowing listeners to become co-creators through choice, attention, and layered experience. Sound is treated not as a fixed object, but as a living field that connects body, place, memory, and imagination.

Rudy’s work unfolds across multiple scales of time, from the immediacy of breath and gesture to seasonal, ecological, and cosmic rhythms. He creates performances, installations, and sensory environments for concert halls, galleries, care centers, outdoor spaces, and community settings, often adapting a single project to live across these different contexts.

He is based in the Kansas City region, where he also works on land shaped by prairie and woods, integrating daily listening practices into both his creative and teaching lives. In addition to his artistic work, Rudy is an active educator and collaborator, committed to interdisciplinary exchange and the integration of art, science, and embodied knowledge. His work seeks to dissolve the boundary between art and life, framing creativity as a form of attentive engagement with the living world.