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. In 2002, assisted by the Australian Elizabethan Travelling Scholarship, Andrée was a resident composer at Chateau de La Napoule.
Her chamber opera Sweet Death, based upon the novel by Claude Tardat, premiered to critical acclaim at the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts in 1991, produced by Chamber Made Opera, commissioned by John Truscott.
In addition to original music for many short film and documentaries, Greenwell has composed feature length scores for Anne-Maree Hess' documentary Refugio: TX and for the feature documentary on the film-maker John Heyer Back to the Back of Beyond. She was composer/music director for Black Mary for the Festival of the Dreaming alongside singer/songwriter Jimmy Little. Her wide range of experience includes composing for Symphony Australia, Film Australia, Chamber Made Opera, Australian Dance Theatre, ABC Radio National Music and Drama Units, Sydney Theatre Company, Film Australia, the Song Company, the Sydney Front, Side Track Theatre, Danceworks, Total Film Productions, the Timorese Cultural Group Association, Contemporary Music Events, The Shrieking Divas, and Belvoir Street Theatre Company.
In 2003 Greenwell was awarded the biennial NSW Women in Arts Fellowship for which she composed 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. Following its premier at The Studio, Sydney Opera House, it was broadcast in full on ABC Radio National on April 11 and repeated April 16, 2009.
Greenwell's critically acclaimed 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, was commissioned by the Sydney Festival in 2003. Dreaming Transportation went on to the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House in February 2004 and was championed by the ABC for various radio broadcast formats, winning an international prize, and being released on CD. It is scheduled for a remount at the Queensland Music Festival in 2011. The song Dreaming Transportation won best classical song at the MusicOz Awards 2004.
In 2008 Greenwell was awarded a Green Room Award for Best Music, Theatre Companies for her score for Venus and Adonis, a Malthouse/Bell Shakespeare co-production. Songs from Venus and Adonis were performed in the Artists Unite benefit concert for the Victorian Bushfire Appeal at the Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, February 2009. (Biography courtesy of the author.)
