Gender Diversity in Music and Art

Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1974. She studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Kevin Volans in Dublin and graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago, with a doctoral degree in composition in June 2002. In 2000 Jennifer won the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. In 2003-2004 Jennifer was a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; during 2004-2005 she lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. From 2006 to 2008 she was the composer-in-residence in South Dublin County for In Context 3. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. In 2008 she was awarded the Praetorius Music Prize for Composition by the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur. In 2009 she lived in Venice, Italy as a guest of the Fondazione Claudio Buziol. She is currently Reader in Music at Brunel University, London.

Walshe’s work is available on many labels including Mere Records, Interval Recordings, Farpoint Recordings and Migro.

Jennifer Walshe will be presenting her keynote and subsequent discussion via Skype. 

Robyn Schulkowsky has been an innovator and collaborator throughout her life. She has dedicated herself to revealing the wonders of percussion to people around the world. Her continuous exploration of new sound dimensions has led to the development of new and unusual musical instruments. An active musician on five continents, Robyn moved to Germany during a heyday of experimental and adventurous classical composition. She has premiered and recorded some of the most important solo percussion works of the 20th and 21st centuries, working with composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman, presenting their works in Africa, India, Asia, the USA, South America and Mexico at festivals like The Proms, Salzburger Festspiel, Musikfest Berlin, Holland Festival, to name a few. With her percussion quintet and Gustavo Dudamel she premiered Sofia Gubaidulinas’s acclaimed composition glorious percussion. 

Schulkowsky’s adventurous nature connects her with exceptional project partners and also with alternative performance spaces. She has collaborated with legendary African drummer Kofi Ghanaba, visual artist Guenther Uecker, actress Edith Clever, social scientist Nilam Ram, and choreographers Merce Cunningham and Sasha Waltz.

Shoeb Ahmad offers a rich and extensive background in Australian music, creating idiosyncratic music over the last decade. Using guitar, keyboard, voice and computer, Shoeb works both as singer/composer and improviser when performing solo and in collaboration. Shoeb has released a diverse range of original music while also working on sound design for dance/theatre, installation pieces and contemporary chamber composition, inspired by 20th Century avant-classical works, Indian ragas and minimalist electronic music. Shoeb has performed throughout Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the UK and the SE Asian region as a solo artist and with groups such as Sensaround, Spartak, Tangents and the Australian Art Orchestra.

Dr Sandy O’Sullivan is an Aboriginal (Wiradjuri) Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast. For 27 years they have taught and researched across gender and sexuality, the body, performance, design and First Nations’ identity.  They hold a practice-focused PhD across these intersecting areas.  
 
Sandy recently completed an internationally-focused Australian Research Council program examining the representation and engagement of First Nations’ Peoples across 470 museums and keeping places.  In 2017 they were funded by the Canadian Government to give a keynote on queer representations in museums and galleries for the Museum Queeries Symposium in Winnipeg as a central activity of the Thinking Through the Museum Collective. Sandy is continuing their engagement with the Collective, and is also working on both an ARC Linkage mapping creative practice across the Barkly Region of the Northern Territory, and an Australia Council for the Arts commissioned report on the state of First Nations’ performance across theatre and dance. Across Sandy’s current work they are considering the ways that Queer First Nations’ arts and artmaking influence, resist and challenge reductive approaches to identity. 
 
Note: Sandy identifies as gender non-binary and uses the pronouns they, them and their. 

Based in Western Australia, Decibel are world leaders in the integration of acoustic instruments and electronics, the interpretation of graphic notations and pioneering digital score formats for composition and performance.

The ensemble has collaborated with composers such as Eliane Radigue, Werner Dafeldecker, Agostino Di Scipio, Alvin Curran, David Toop, Marina Rosenfeld, Lionel Marchetti, Andreas Weixler and Johannes S. Sistermanns and worked with iconic Australian composers Jon Rose, Alan Lamb, Ross Bolleter, Warren Burt, Eric Griswold and Anthony Pateras. Decibel have contributed the Australian premieres of works by Fausto Romitelli, Tristan Murail, Alvin Lucier, Peter Ablinger, Mauricio Kagel and have toured and recorded monograph concerts dedicated to Roger Smalley, Alvin Lucier, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi.

Decibel  have commissioned over 60 new works since their foundation in 2009, have toured Europe and Australia, recorded for ABC Classic FM and SWR German Radio, and released five albums to date on Australian and international labels. The ensemble has developed and commercialised the Decibel ScorePlayer iPad app, a score reading device incorporating mobile score formats and networked coordination performance environments that is sold worldwide.

Decibel are Cat Hope (artistic director, flutes, bass), Lindsay Vickery (reeds), Stuart James (electronics, keyboards), Aaron Wyatt (viola, iPad programming), Tristen Parr (cello) and Louise Devenish (percussion).

Vanessa is a percussive artist dedicated to exploring how sound shapes our lives, awakening our ears to new sounds, in new spaces, with the hope that attentive listening will lead to attentive custodianship of place. With a long history in experimental music, Vanessa uses this body of knowledge to consider how we listen through site-specific explorations, and to explore new collaborative sonic ideas. Trained as a percussionist in Australia, Germany and the USA, Vanessa relies on this sonic investigation of objects to build compositions, create contexts for improvisation, interpret the voices of other composers and collaborate across art-forms and disciplines. She has toured the world for 25 years, premiering over 100 works by significant national and international composers, presenting work at major international festivals, and collaborating with improvisers, dancers, artists and more.

Nicole Monks is a trans-disciplinary artist of Yamatji Wajarri, Dutch and English heritage. Living and practising in Redfern, Nicole is informed by her cross-cultural identity and her work takes its focus from storytelling, as a way to connect the past with the present and future. Her designs take a conceptual approach, often embedded with narratives, and aim to promote cross-cultural understanding and communication.

Nicole is an artist in residence at the UWA School of Design and SymbioticA.