Rory Pilgrim

Rory Pilgrim works across songwriting, composition, film, music video, text, drawing and live performance. In an increasingly digital age, his work explores how activism, spirituality and music can create spaces for connection, fostering community both beyond and behind our screens. As an artist, Pilgrim creates work that centres lived experience, making space for people to be fully seen and heard beyond the systems that shape them. Through sustained dialogue, workshops, and collaboration, he aims to challenge how we come together, speak, listen, and strive for social change by sharing and voicing personal experience. 

Music flows throughout Pilgrim’s work. With a background in church, classical, and pop music, composing and songwriting enable him to express what is possible beyond words. In a similar way, drawing and image-making are vital tools for envisioning what is possible. Working from a deeply personal place first, Pilgrim creates a template for others to enter into dialogue, express what is most important to them and find connection. This practice has resulted in large-scale film works, performance and exhibitions that focus on interconnections between social care, mental health services, homelessness, the criminal justice system and environment. 

Recent Solo Shows include: Vleeshal Centre for Contemporary Art (2026), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2024); Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd — Centraal Museum Utrecht (2024); and WAMX, Turku (2022). Pilgrim has also made commissions, screenings and performances for Serpentine Galleries, London (2022), MoMA, New York (2022), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), and Glasgow Film Festival (2020). In 2019, Pilgrim won the Prix de Rome, and he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2023.