Denmark In New York is the official blog for the Consulate General of Denmark in New York. Last month they interviewed me for their series Danes In New York. In it I talk about living in Brooklyn, working in diverse fields and how COVID has been for us living here:
“Among the neat rows of characteristic brownstones and quiet tree-lined streets in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, there is a Danish household: Kristian Leth, his wife Tea Lindeburg and their three kids moved to New York City over half a decade ago, settling in the genteel neighborhood and making it their home. Today, Park Slope is where Tea refines her work on her upcoming Netflix series Equinox and Kristian composes the series’ soundtrack. The Brooklyn neighborhood is, after all, a creative’s dream-space: leafy, inhabited by writers (Paul Auster), actors (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and a coterie of journalists, academics, and progressive thinkers.
But Kristian is an unusual artist and is particularly difficult to characterize. He has acting credits. He is a musician. He composes scores for films. And he is an author of non-fiction and fiction works, with a successful fantasy-fiction novel Mithos released in 2017. He has also tackled the role of Christianity in Danish cultural heritage in a documentary series for Danmarks Radio. “I am always trying to explore something but there is no strategy to it for me,” Kristian Leth explains. “I never saw one line of work as the limit to the other.”
The truth is that Leth’s work is driven by exploration and storytelling — a tireless engine that has produced a broad-ranging and diversified repertoire aimed at satisfying his own curiosity rather than pleasing the crowd. He isn’t afraid to put himself out there; he isn’t afraid to limit his creativity.
Denmark in New York met up with Kristian Leth at his Park Slope home in mid-October to get his take on being a Dane in New York, surviving the global COVID-19 epicenter, and his complicated process as an artist.”
Kristian Leth 