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’ twice at the Australian Art Music Awards: in 2024 with her performance-installation Visions | Vestiges in the Chamber Music category; and in 2025 with Tactus in the Electroacoustic/Sound Art category. 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—Dark Oceanography, collaboratively developed with a team of artistic and scientific researchers—integrates climate science with experimental music, modelling ocean currents in percussion trio and live spatial amplification.

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, and she is a regular contributor to reviews at TEMPO: A Quarterly Review of New Music. 

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.