Wick

Wick Simmons is a cellist, composer, performer, and producer whose practice moves between concert halls, experimental theater, nightlife, and installation. Trained classically as a cellist and self-taught as an electronic artist, he reimagines the cello as a focal point where music, sculpture, memory, eroticism, and performance converge.

His bold array of original work has been presented at venues across Europe and the United States, among them PLEX Athens, House of Blues Chicago, The Tank NYC, an unmarked wartime bunker in East Berlin, The Owl Music Parlor, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), LA Dance Project, and Maison de l'Amérique Latine for Paris Fashion Week.

With Dutch Kills Theater Company, composers inti figgis-vizueta, Conrad Tao, and Jack McGuire, and multimedia artist Laurie Olinder, he created Exquisite Drones, a collective composition built on the 1920's surrealist game "exquisite corpse," in which each artist contributed without hearing what came before. In 2023, he collaborated with Kėkė Søl on THE BUNKER, a web of electric cellos suspended in rope rigged by shibari practitioners in a Cold War-era bunker in East Berlin, inviting spectators to sound the ropes themselves and explore the hidden resonances of erotica within the space's buried history. From it came Quiver, a performance sculpture of electric cello encased in steel, activated by rope, with techno built from live impact play and a global chorus of erotic voices. Commissioned by queer party producer CircuitMOM for International Mister Leather's Victory Party. In 2026, he created the sound design and live cello score for performance artist Ron Athey's Table of Contents: A Life in 33 Chapters, presented by LACE as part of RESILIENCE at LA Dance Project, a spoken-word autobiography for a memoir that may never be written, moving across 33 chapters through Pentecostal childhood, exile, the Los Angeles queer punk underground, the early years of the AIDS crisis, and a return to esoteric Christianity.

He made his solo debut at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater for the Anthony Quinn Foundation's ceremony honoring Lin-Manuel Miranda, and has performed at Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Constellation Chicago, The Kitchen, The Dolby, and MASS MoCA for the 2017 Bang on a Can Marathon. He played the onstage cellist in the first Broadway National Tour of The Band's Visit, and scored music for GRAMMY-winning vocalist Zachary James'album Song of Myself, named "the classical project of the year" by Daily Music Spin. He has been featured on NPR'sFrom The Top, WQXR, WNYC, The Cello Sherpa Podcast, and Second Inversion (Classical KING FM).

He is a prizewinner of the Yamaha Young Performing Artists Competition and an Anthony Quinn FoundationFellow, serving as a recurring judge for the Foundation's national competition and as a panelist for The Hambidge Center. Wick is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he studied with Professor Hans Jørgen Jensen, and Manhattan School of Music. He has also studied privately with hybrid-musician Todd Reynolds and cellist Jeff Ziegler of the Kronos Quartet. He has since led workshops on Sound in Performance Practice at Ron Athey's Darkness Visible II in Athens, and on Creativity in Composition at The Longy School of Music at Bard College.

He performs on a Marten Cornelissen cello formerly owned by Bernard Greenhouse, and on a sculptural instrument by South African maker Murray Kuun.