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Award-winning composer Andrée Greenwell has worked across mainstream and experimental platforms within the Australian performing arts, film and television. As artistic director of Green Room Music, she is a creator of unique hybrid performance works. She also composed and directed the short films Laquiem and Medusahead that screened at many international and national film and digital art festivals.

Her new music-theatre work, Dreaming Transportation: Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson, inspired by Jordie Albiston’s verse history Botany Bay Document, premiered in January 2003 at the Sydney Festival to critical acclaim. Dreaming Transportation featured the voices of Deborah Conway, Justine Clarke, Amie Mc Kenna, Christine Douglas and Miriam Allan, with seven musicians and triple screen projections. Dreaming Transportation went on to the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House in February 2004, produced by Performing Lines. It was also championed by the ABC for various formats and released on CD.

In 2003, Andrée Greenwell was the recipient of the biennial NSW Women in Arts Fellowship for which she developed a new music-theatre work The Hanging of Jean Lee, based upon the verse biography by Jordie Albiston that traces the life of Jean Lee, the last woman to be hanged in Australia, in 1951. Greenwell researched and directed the images for the production as well as composed the score. The Hanging of Jean Lee was broadcast in full on ABC Radio National on April 11, 2009.

Since 1986, she has also worked as a composer and sometimes a performer for many companies including Symphony Australia, Film Australia, ChamberMade Opera, Sydney Theatre Company, Film Australia, the Song Company, the Sydney Front, Side Track Theatre, Australian Dance Theatre, the Public Address System, Danceworks, Total Film Productions, the Timorese Cultural Group Association, Contemporary Music Events, Terrapin Puppet Theatre Company, Eureka Ensemble, the Backdoor Sinfonietta, Handspan, and Belvoir Street Theatre Company.

Her chamber opera Sweet Death, based upon the novel by Claude Tardat, in which a young woman gorges herself to death on gourmet pastries , premiered to critical acclaim at the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts in 1991, produced by ChamberMade Opera.

Greenwell's scores for many theatre productions include Sydney Theatre Company's Volpone, for which she was nominated for a Helpmann award in the category of Best Original Score, 2003, Sydney Theatre Company's The School for Scandal (music director), directed by Judy Davis 2001, and Black Mary for the Festival of the Dreaming in 1998, working alongside singer/songwriter Jimmy Little. Andrée Greenwell recently composed music for the Bell Shakespeare/Malthouse co-production of Venus and Adonis, also nominated for a Helpmann Award. Songs from this score were presented in February 2009 in the 'Artists Unite' benefit concert for the Victorian Bushfire Appeal at Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, performed by Melissa Madden Gray and Susan Prior accompanied by recorders, electric guitar and percussion.

Andrée Greenwell was a resident composer at Chateau de La Napoule, France, 2002, assisted by the Australian Elizabethan Travelling Scholarship.

For information about her most recent work The Villainelles, and for further details, visit www.myspace.com/andreegreenwell

Biography provided by the composer — current to April 2009