I grew up on unceded Aboriginal land—Whadjuk Noongar boodjar—and recognise the sovereignty of First Nations people across Australia and internationally. The contribution of First Nations knowledge to music and culture is immeasurable. I pay my respects to Elders past, present, and emerging.

 

Kate Milligan (NL/AU) is an Australian composer and designer based between Amsterdam and Sydney. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary research, exploring themes of temporality, ecology, and more-than-human creativity. Her compositions feature delicate sonic processes, and soundworlds that are equally intimate and expansive. She is interested in the ethics of collaboration with natural systems, and in creative communication about climate change. Most recently, Kate’s work has taken a material turn towards water: watery logic, leaky ideologies, fluid bodies.

She has won ‘Work of the Year’ three times at the Australian Art Music Awards: in 2024 with her performance-installation Visions | Vestiges in the Chamber Music category; and in 2025 and 2026 in the Electroacoustic/Sound Art category with Tactus and Dark Oceanography respectively. She has been commissioned by ensembles and projects including ELISION Ensemble, Decibel New Music Ensemble, The Sound Collectors Lab, Standard Issue, the London Symphony Orchestra Soundhub, and the Australian National Academy of Music, amongst others. Her most recent work—Keystones (music at the edge of rupture), an octet premiered at the 50th anniversary Spitalfields Music Festival—is a site-responsive work for the Islington Tunnel, London, and positions composition and arts research methodology as a kind of multi-species ethnography.

With a background in feminist musicology, Kate’s music-making often engages critically with institutions and ideology. Her existing research examines musical-discursive manifestations of popular and neoliberal feminisms in orchestral conducting, as well as identity and aesthetics in new opera. Her writing on new music and art is published in both popular and academic contexts. 

Kate is currently a PhD student at The University of Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music, within the Australian Research Council Laureate Project ‘Resonant Earth: Music, Ecology and Climate Justice’, directed by Prof. Liza Lim. She is a graduate of Information Experience Design (MA) at the Royal College of Art, London. This study was generously supported by the Schenberg Music Fellowship and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. She also holds a MMus (musicology) and a BA(Hons) (composition) from The University of Western Australia, where she studied with James Ledger, and under the supervision of Doctors Sarah Collins and Cecilia Sun.