Support and recognition for LGBTQ+ composers
As an initiative to support and recognize exceptional and innovative LGBTQ+ composers, producers, and musicians, the OT microgrants provide selected artists with licenses, mentoring, and a platform to showcase their music.
Introducing Leah King—musician and multimedia artist
Leah King is a musician and multimedia artist working in film, visual art, performance, and installation. In an ongoing exploration of presence, her abstracted sonic and visual collages lean into repetition as a form of stability.
King’s work has been shown at San Francisco MoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Museum of the African Diaspora, and supported by Berlin Musicboard, Brooklyn Arts Council, and Center for Cultural Innovation. Through her academic work in Nightlife Studies, she presented her research at the 2025 Dancecult Conference at Technische Universität Berlin, and published in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.
Her recent audio installation, Berlin Ecologies, exploring race, immigration, war, and family ties, was performed at KCHUNG Radio at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Archives, and will travel to CECUT - Centro Cultural Tijuana in 2026. Alongside her other work, King has a number of new releases underway, including her new dance single, Lorde Over All, featured on the Feminist Synth Lab FSL-004 Compilation.
About the microgrants
The OT Microgrants initiative aims to support and recognize LGBTQ+ composers by awarding selected artists a package of licenses and mentoring—a microgrant. With each microgrant we will shine a spotlight on the artist's music, and hopefully help to advance their work and extend their professional network.
Why are we doing this? The composer community is slowly becoming more diverse, but it’s still hugely imbalanced, and its doors are not always open for queer composers. Encouraged by OT staff members from the queer community, we’ve initiated these microgrants to provide support and recognition to LGBTQ+ composers of all levels. We believe wholeheartedly that increased diversity will make the composer community more dynamic and vibrant, and ultimately lead to more exciting music.
Would you like to be considered? Send us an email using the link below.
This project is audited by dif e.V.