Leila Alexander is a performance and interdisciplinary artist working across live performance, moving image and immersive technologies. Her practice is concerned with the psychological and psychosomatic dimensions of performance — specifically, how the live human body can reach an audience at a level beneath conscious attention.
 

Trained as a classical soprano and dancer, Alexander treats the voice and body as instruments for transmitting emotional and psychological states. Her work investigates how trauma, memory and internal experience are held in the body, and how performance and immersive technology can be combined to make those states genuinely felt rather than merely witnessed.

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LUCIA_VR (2021–25) brings live operatic singing into virtual reality, testing what the presence of a live performer does to the experience of immersive space. The work was developed through the UKRI Immersive Opera Research Programme in collaboration with composer Toby Young and Radical Realities' Christian Venables and Kuba Jekiel.
 

Alexander trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, the Mozarteum Salzburg and the Dame Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation Programme. She has performed internationally at Wigmore Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and Tbilisi Opera House, and has performed in works by Gabrielle Goliath, Lee Mingwei and Dom Bouffard at the Venice Biennale, Auckland Art Gallery and Gallery46, London. She appeared as lead actress in the New Zealand feature film Stars in Her Eyes.
 

Alongside her artistic practice, Alexander has worked as Company Manager and Producer of Pegasus Opera Company and is Artistic Associate of the Shakespeare in Music Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. A qualified commercial litigator, she has spoken at Opera America's A Global Dialogue in Opera and consulted to Operabase.