Artistic Residency - Lorraine Gilliard - Reaude

Always on the lookout for depth, Lorraine Gilliard is a guitarist, songwriter and singer with a very natural and poetical musicality. Her playing and voice are characterized by warm tones and intimacy. Her compositions are infused with the sounds and rhythms from diverse cultures, and are described as "hauntingly beautiful melodies and harmonies" (Max Christensen) .When performing solo, her repertoire currently consists of folk songs arranged for classical guitar mixed with folk singing, and her own original songs.

Lorraine was born in Belgium in a musician’s family and started learning music with the piano when she was 6. At 10 years old, she entered in the Children’s and Youth Choir of La Monnaie, the Belgium’s national opera house, and remained part of the choir for eight years. This experience had later an important impact on her desire to pursue music professionally. Lorraine was interrested in all forms of living art and was, beside her musical formation, taking classes of dance, declamation and theater: she particularily liked the Michael Chekhov technique with which she was finding a lot of artistic freedom. She also started learning classical guitar and decided to study it professionally a few years later. In 2023, she graduated from her Master in classical guitar performance at the Lemmensinstituut, part of LUCA School of arts.

She is the founder and lead singer of Reaude, which she sees as a box to gather artists coming from diverse cultures around original compositions.