Collaborating with Culture Mill
Since 2021, Caitlyn has created original soundscapes for Culture Mill performances, practices, and installations. She has also supported sound composition and design development for projects in their early stages. Whether played live or recorded, soundscapes for Culture Mill have created concept-based textural and tonal environments for embodied stories and histories to be amplified.
Explore the projects she has collaborated on and contributed to below.
Photo by Anna Maynard
Recent works
How To Be A Visitor (2025)
How To Be a Visitor is an American Dance Festival-commissioned work by Culture Mill, conceived by dancer/choreographer Tommy Noonan in collaboration with artists across the world: Jassem Hindi (Palestine/France), Frank Mugisha (Rwanda/Uganda), Edgar Kanyike (Uganda), Sebulime Elisha Davis (Uganda), Cortland Gilliam (USA), and Caitlyn Swett (USA). This innovative performance connects artists and audiences across multiple countries through simultaneous, live-streamed solo performances in dance, sound, and poetry. Each participating location will host a live audience, with a screen displaying a real-time video feed from the other sites. These feeds will be mixed and manipulated live by Culture Mill’s media designer on-site in Durham, North Carolina, creating a dynamic, shared visual experience across all locations. The result is an immersive, trans-cultural encounter where audiences witness the clarity and complexity of shared experience across distance — navigating what it means to be a visitor in bodies, languages, and contexts not entirely their own.
Caitlyn composed the live soundscore in collaboration with Tommy Noonan and Cortland Gilliam.
Photos by Ben McKeowen
Photos by Anna Maynard
When We were Queens… (2024)
Photos by Sarah Marguier
When We were Queens… by dancer/choreographer Murielle Elizéon and cellist/composer Shana Tucker, commissioned by NC State LIVE with co-production by the Wilson Center (CFCC) and Weatherspoon Art Museum (UNCG), is shaped as a ritual to call the ancestors. It is the whispering of a spell. It is an attempt to reclaim a lost mythology through somatic embodied imagination. It seeks to face the void of erasure for individual and collective healing. It is shaped as a diptych: two solos in conversation to acknowledge both the singularity of Murielle and Shana’s cultural experience (one is French, the other is American) and the common thread running through their experience as women of color from the African Diaspora. The performance convokes the audience for a moment of shared witnessing while acknowledging the complexity of a gaze which has often exoticized our Black and Brown bodies.
Caitlyn supported early soundscape development during a Culture Mill residency at the Weatherspoon Art Museum.
Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts (2021-2026)
Photos by Iximché Media
Caitlyn has created live and recorded soundscapes for performances and social practices during Culture Mill’s residency as part of the Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts initiative. Launching (2021) and culminating (2026) with the CPA-commissioned performance-practice Eclipse, Culture Mill’s residency has included classroom visits, a co-taught Social Geography course culminating with the practice-installation Well, and the installation-social practice Bloc, among other projects for which Caitlyn has created live and recorded soundscapes to hold place-based histories.
Explore how the soundscapes were made: See Sounds of Eclipse and Creating the Old Well Soundscape.
Films by Iximché Media