Bio

Born in Vancouver, BC (Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations), Zell Couver is an international music composer, violinist, and multidisciplinary artist with musical styles of punk, neo-classical strings, electronica and sound arts.

Couver’s works encapsulate lived experience of queer disability and Asian Diaspora through poetry music, experimental soundscapes, sound design and queer cabaret in Vancouver’s local arts production from burlesque to theatre. She has been an avid advocate for disability arts and queer rights, actively fighting against ableism, Anti-Asian racism, and sexual liberty rights!

Couver’s string quartet piece, La Victoire de St.Roch (Canada Day, 2018), featured in CBC Radio through the Jean Coulthard Reading Session by the Canadian Music Centre at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. Since then, she debuted as a burlesque composer at the Fox Cabaret in 2019 through Strange Seductions’ queer adaptation of Hades and Persephone with local burlesque performers, composed music for the Purgamentum (2019, directed by Julie Bruns, Shawn Major, & Steve Kammerer), which featured at Blood ‘N Guts 48 hours Filmmaking festival and worked alongside John Jack Paterson on Mishka Lavigne’s theatre adaptation of Haven in 2021.

Graduated with both a Bachelor’s of Music at Vancouver Community College and a Masters of Music Composition at Goldsmiths University in London, England, Couver has performed across the UK, and parts of Canada, including Babes in the Bush Burlesque (Whitehorse), Disability Collective (Toronto), Glamour Alley (Yellowknife), Maskquerade (Vancouver), Rock with the Foxes (Portsmouth, UK), Klub Obskura (East London, UK), Persona Collective (Central London, UK) and Digital Roses (South London, UK).