Eric Leonardson is a Chicago-based audio artist, co-founder and Executive Director of the World Listening Project, founder and co-chair of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, and President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Leonardson is Adjunct Associate Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), teaching in the Department of Sound since 2002. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (Visual Arts) at Northern Illinois University in 1980, and a Master of Fine Arts (Time Arts) degree at SAIC in 1983. As a performer, composer, and sound designer, Leonardson provided sounds of the Chicago based physical theater company Plasticene (1995-2012). With the Springboard, a self-built instrument made in 1994, Leonardson performs, records, and tours with musicians and sound artists around the world. While a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College in 2013, Leonardson co-edited Ways of Listening, Figures of Thought: A Festschrift for R. Murray Schafer On the Occasion of His 80th Birthday with Sabine Breitsameter, published on Soundscape & Environmental Medialab/Hochschule Darmstadt. Forthcoming articles will be published in Urban Soundscapes and Critical Citizenship (University of Limerick) and Sound in the Land III (Conrad Grebel College University of Waterloo). As Artistic Director in the B3 Biennale’s Autumn School in Frankfurt, Germany, Leonardson gave a keynote, ‘Spatial Sound & 3D-Audio – neue Konzepte für die Gestaltung akustischer Umwelten und 360°- Umgebungen,’ with Project Manager, Sabine Breitsameter. There he led two workshops on ‘Spatial Sound’ for students and young professionals and making ‘Children’s HörSpiel!.’ In January 2015 Leonardson will be a Ragdale artist-in-residence.