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Photo: Nina Roberts

Timothy Hansen (b.1978) is a composer, music director, and youth-arts tutor who has been engaged by a diverse range of companies and individuals to create new works for theatre and music. He has had work performed around Australia as well as New Zealand, France, Germany, the UK, Mexico, and the US. He currently lives New York and is undertaking his Master's in Music Theory Composition at New York University. He studies with Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe.

Hansen has written for ensembles such as the Jack Quartet (Paper Roses), Saffire (Spiderwine), Griffyn Ensemble (Killa Chinchilla), Dominant 7 (Comic Book Hero), Canberra Youth Orchestra (Of Flying and Falling), and Guitarstrophe (Trouble in the Ribcage), and has composed new works for guitarists Daniel McKay (Dark Deeds and Wicked Words; Earwig) and Tim Kain (Little Bloody and FIERCE!), American violinist Patti Kilroy (Fat Bird), a series of miniatures featuring tarogato and electronics for clarinetist Nicole Canham (Secret Things), and a cross-discipline collaboration with harpist Liena Lacey, writer Joan Cornish and dancer Janine Ayres (People are Fatal). He is a founding member of the West 4 New Music Collective, which promotes the work of emerging composers in New York, and is the director of ExhAust, a New Music ensemble based in New York consisting of Australian musicians exposing the work of Australian composers to American audiences.

Hansen has been a composition fellow at the Darwin Guitar Festival in Australia, and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute and the Norfolk New Music Workshop in the USA, and in 2008 he was an artist in residence in remote Hill End in rural Australia. He will commence a residency at the Park Avenue Armory in New York with New Music Ensemble Le Train Bleu in September 2011.

Hansen's uniquely evocative composition style has attracted the attention of a number of theatre and dance companies. He has composed scores for productions such as Dancing Giant's gothic, circus-inspired Death's Waiting Room, Centrepiece Theatre's bizarrely unsettling A Most Curious Dream (with Warwick Lynch), and ARTS Theatre Company's poignant exploration of sexuality, Telling Moments (with Helen Way).

He composed scores for 2010 Sydney Fringe Festival shows Cuckoo (created by Margot Politis) and Dancing Giant's, Molly: A Tale of Blood and Guts and Giants and Weddings, as well as Asylum, a dance-piece created by Adelaide-based choreographer Danny Hales, which enjoyed sell-out season at both the 2010 Adelaide Feast Festival and the 2011 Adelaide Fringe Festival. Hansen has also worked with the Sydney Theatre Company's Actors' Company on the development of new work.

In 2008 Hansen was commissioned by the Pacific School Games to compose two new works for the opening ceremony. These works When You're a Sheep and Tri the Pi were performed to an audience of ten thousand people by almost one thousand school-aged dancers, singers and musicians in the Canberra Stadium.

Hansen's theatrical flair and passion for music make him an excellent music director, and he has worked in this capacity with a diverse range of music ensembles, cabarets, and theatre companies. For many years he directed the Canberra Mandolin Ensemble and jazz vocal group Rhythm Syndicate, leading the latter to the state finals for the ABC Choir of the Year Competition in 2006. He has worked with the Canberra Philharmonic Society (Pack up your Troubles!), Everyman Productions (Tickets, Music Passport and Singer, Dancer, Actor), The Street Theatre (Berlin: Cabaret of Desire), and the all-female revue Lady Sings It Better as part of the 2010 Sydney Mardi Gras Festival. He has recently commenced an ongoing collaborative project with Spanish performance artist Alfredo Tauste, Freddy Malaboca's Insulting and Therapeutic Cabaret.

Hansen greatly enjoys engaging with young people to create new work and develop their creative skills. For three years he worked with the Australian National University's MuST programme (Music for Students with Talent) to create new music works by and for young people. He has also been engaged by a number of youth theatre companies to create new youth theatre pieces, including Canberra Youth Theatre (The Moth Tree with Shiereen Magsalin), PACT (A Minute Past Midnight) and Australian Theatre for Young People. He also had the good fortune to be engaged by Shopfront Contemporary Arts and Performance, first as music director for the 2009 Junior Ensemble's devised production Too Good to be True (with director Kerreen Ely-Harper), then as Artistic Associate for the Junior Ensemble.

Hansen holds a Bachelor of Arts (Theatre & Media)(Honours) from Charles Sturt University in Bathurst and a Bachelor of Music (Composition) from the Australian National University in Canberra, where he studied with Jim Cotter and Larry Sitsky.

Tim Hansen — current to August 2011