Aneliya Avtandilova is a Caucasus-born UK-based composer, musician, collaborator and writer. A self-taught musician, she graduated from the Bard College’s programme “Music and Theatre”, delivering an orchestral composition “Sparrow Phase” as her graduation project. Goethe Institute and British Council fellow as an emerging composer, winner of the Swedish Institute-initiated national competition for female musicians, she’s mostly known for her work as a songwriter, singer, guitar player and co-producer in the now-defunct band Chkbns that performed at KEXP, SXSW, Canadian Music Week, Reeperbahn Festival and The Great Escape, besides touring around Asia and Europe. The band’s only LP, Autwik (2019), got noticed by the likes of NPR, The Clash, Louder Than War and Quietus for its ‘hard-edged etherealism’, ‘lush widescreen melancholy’, ‘ghostly introspection’ and ‘hypnotising vocals’.

In October 2019 she embarked on a residency at the artistic development organisation Metal in Liverpool, UK, developing and presenting 'Mass1' - a collage composition, exploring chance techniques, working with site-specific found material and graphic notation. An echo of that experience could be heard in her later works as Gdeto - a solo project mainly exploring the ambient music toolkit and impressionism.

In the summer of 2023 ada ardor was launched, Aneliya’s new solo electronic music project, which so far has been supported by BBC, KEXP, Amazing Radio UK and Rolling Stone. In ada ardor, she’s traversing the boundaries between the domains of pop music and conceptual art.

As a writer, Aneliya has two collections of fairy tales published as hardcovers both in her native Russian and in translation, while her English poetry has been featured in the likes of Poetry Matters and Plum Tree Tavern. A feature-length film, the comical fantasy "Gary, Barry, Larry and Countess of Noral" for which she co-wrote a screenplay and which was filmed in New York during the pandemic, is soon to be premiered to the public.

Frequently the protagonists of Aneliya’s stories are non-human animals. A theatrical miniature about a primate navigating a human society was premiered in London in 2021, being selected for the decennial anniversary Bureau of Silly Ideas show. “Dream Trance” - an animated story exploring the roots of violence through the relationship of a cat and a monkey, co-written with a visual artist le___capucin, has been included in the official programmes of the Anti-War International Film Festival (Estonia, 2023) and Diametrale Festival (Austria, 2024).

Aneliya has also worked on music for films and exhibitions and composed an album of library music for an independent London publisher Frisson.

A diplomaed translator and a former academic ghostwriter, she's also been extensively working in translation, and involved in the creation of fiction, non-fiction and academic texts of both prosaic and poetic nature.

Having visited around 30 countries as a touring musician, it’s not surprising that Aneliya’s creative practice shows an eclectic blend of references and a tendency for interpreting in-between phenomena. Neither is surprising that her lasting bond with music has influenced the way she approaches text.