short bio:
Matt Cornell is an award winning choreographer and composer, working to ask better questions by collaborating with inspiring artists, in diverse contexts, across (the FKA) Asia-Pacific. Matt’s career interrogates how we embody systems – social, cultural, political, or technological – and in turn how these systems embody us by forming communities and informing identities.
He is working to remember our future through dancing, performance, sound composition, text, discussion, and curation, in varying venues including theatres, galleries, public spaces, online and print. Across these radically different contexts is the core effort of conjuring space! events! experiences! in which to gather, to share something that just might innervate the stories we tell ourselves. That we may get better at living together.
Matt also operates as the Digital Artist-Curator at Critical Path centre for choreographic research, is the founder of Wombat Radio podcast, and the curator for “How Did It Come to This?” zine at Darwin Community Arts.
He is currently an artist in residence with Next Wave, to invoke a curatorial framework beyond “Digital”.
He is a proud member of Style Impressions Krew
He is a founding member of The Pump
He releases music under the stage name @TheMattmosphere
further information:
Matt has had the the extreme delight of working with Joshua Thomson (The BLOKES Project + Legs On The Wall), Angela Goh (New York and Helsinki tours), The Farm (and prior to that Gavin Webber’s DanceNorth), Davis Freeman, Lisa Wilson @ Sydney Dance Company’s Opera House season, Shaun Parker Company (This Show Is About People & Happy As Larry), Strings Attached, Rimbun Dahun, Dance Makers Collective, Emma Fishwick, Tiffany-&-the-Curls, Style Impressions Krew @ Darwin Festival, Miranda Wheen (multiple shows + residencies at Dance4 and Bundanon Trust), TRACKS Dance Company and Courtney Scheu. Matt has been lucky enough to receive the 2011 Arts NT Young Achiever of the Year award, a danceWEB scholarship (2010) and an Australian Dance Award (as composer) for “Look The Other Way” by Cadi McCarthy & Laura Boynes.
He was a NFSA HipHop artist-in-residence, Legs On The Wall artist-in-residence for ‘OpenSource’, an invited participant at the Ultima Vez Research Lab, and invited speaker at TEDx Darwin on “The Power of movement: Its affect on our state of being”.
Other adventures include making sound for dance film for extreme Sports DVDs, fine art/gallery installations and performing words and beats at Darwin Festival and ImpulsTanz festival lounge.
He has facilitated (in a teachers role) at P.A.R.T.S. & VCA, led technique class for companies including DanceNorth and Force Majeure and workshops at Dancehouse, QUT, WAAPA, NAISDA, The FARM, Ev and Bow, Brent Street, IDC, SDC PPY and many others.
His work has been supported / presented by Darwin Festival, MetroArts, SouthBank Corp, Bundanon Cultural Trust and Critical Path, Australia Council for the Arts, PACT Sydney, Riverside Theatres, Dance4 Nottingham, Melbourne Festival and various dance companies through choreographic commissions.
His music compositions have played Sydney Opera House for Sydney Dance Company, and internationally for Suhali Micheline, extreme sports DVD, and a Kuala Lumpur performance season by Rimbun Dahan.
His writing has been published in Critical Dialogues & This Container and his first book is held in dance libraries across Australia, Asia and Europe.
His work has won awards including an Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Youth & Community Dance, The Northern Territory Young Achiever of the Year Award in Arts, as well as numerous awards for films he choreographed including an Australian Short Film Award and a Nevada Film Festival Best Experimental Short Film Award.