Professional & concise 3rd person bio

Steve Gilliland is an award winning New Orleans-based sound designer, composer, and musician. A member of theater ensembles Goat in the Road Productions and Intramural Theater, he received a Crescent City Theater Award for his sound design on The Lehman Trilogy (Le Petit Theatre), as well as a nomination for a Pat Bourgeois Award for A Midsummer Night's Dream (Tulane Shakespeare Festival).  Other credits include Carlota (Goat in the Road Productions), Somnotomy (Intramural Theater), and A Streetcar Named Desire (Irene Collective).

Gilliland served as lead sound designer, composer, and audio engineer for The Audio Experience at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art — an immersive sonic installation built from ambisonic and binaural field recordings, original compositions, and interviews. He has created additional audio installations for the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and composes music for podcasts, escape rooms, and video installations.

He has collaborated with Artspot Productions on Road to Damascus, which has toured extensively across the United States, and recently sound designed for A Brief History of the Telephone by Obie Award-winning playwright Deb Margolin, which opened at Dixon Place in New York City.

Gilliland creates mixed-media visual art incorporating circuit boards, doll parts, and recycled electronic components, and releases original music under the name GillaWatts.

Deeply personal & lengthy 1st person bio

I make art.  Musical art, sound art, visual art and sometimes multimedia art.  I make art because I have to.  Creation has been the only consistent element of my life that has always made sense to me.

Much of my artwork, specifically my music, is informed by a life altering experience I had when I was 27.

In 2017, I did ayahuasca and experienced elightenment psychosis transcendence schizophrenia. . . something. Divine madness perhaps?  I am still trying to figure it out.

2 weeks after taking part in an ayahuasca ceremony in Spain, I started believing I was a divine prophet.  I was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility in London for 2 and a half weeks before being released when my father flew over to accompany me on the journey back.  I was convinced I was invincible, could teleport anywhere and could communicate telepathically with anyone around the world.  I thought I could heal people just by looking at them or touching them.  I was putting cigarettes out on my arms, eating receipts because I thought I could download information that way and a few times almost killed myself just to prove I would come back right away.  I am extremely lucky to be alive, and I am pretty well convinced I did indeed die in many other fracturing universes.

This state of being lasted for 3 months, during which time I was hospitalized 3 more times, spent all of my money, racked up a large amount of debt, lost all of my guitar students and other streams of income, damaged many of my professional and personal relationships, was physically assaulted twice for freaking people out, got evicted, forcing me to move in with my parents.

It was wild.

After 3 months, I abruptly snapped out of it, which was an incredibly surreal experience akin to unplugging from a virtually reality video game that I had been playing for 3 months straight.  I remembered everything quite clearly, so as the consequences of my actions of the previous 3 months began stacking up, I quickly fell into a state of despair and severe suicidal depression.  Everything I had worked towards for my entire career was in pieces.  I had no money and no way of making money.  I was living with my parents.  I had repeatedly embarrassed myself in front my entire community, whether through behaving like a literal manic, to neglecting all of my responsibilities, to adding an immense amount of stress to my family and friends.  I stopped creating during this time.  I stopped doing everything.  I felt like an empty shell of myself and had no idea how to move forward.

After about 6 months of despair, I forced myself to start making music again.  I started pouring my depression and memories of the experience into a series of songs, which eventually became "The Voices Are Gone" EP.  I performed a release show publicly and discovered that in order to properly heal, I needed to be as open as humanly possible about what happened.

Mental health is fragile and needs to be maintained.

Go to therapy.  Meditate.  Journal.  Exercise.  Make art.  Talk to someone.

Psychosis is real and can happen to anyone.

I truly believe to this day that what I experienced was real.  I was God.  I just forgot everyone else is too.

If you know someone who is experiencing psychosis, listen to them.  Do not invalidate their experience.  Trying to convince them that what they are experiencing isn't "real" is is counterproductive and might cause them to lose trust in you and feel more isolated.

What they are experiencing is "real."  Our brains generate our reality based on inputs from the outside world. Just because the reality that your brain is generating fits with the majority of those around you does not make it more "true."

Anyway, thanks for reading this!  Life is a trip.  Art is fun.  Be goofy.  Tell your friends and family you love them.  Make something. Help someone.

Big love goodbuddies.