Donna Hewitt

Dr. Donna Hewitt is a performer, vocalist, electronic music composer and instrument designer. Her primary interest in recent years has been exploring performance in mediatized environments and exploring new ways of interfacing the voice with electronic media. She is the inventor of the eMic, a sensor enhanced microphone stand for electronic music performance which she has been developing and performing works with both locally and internationally for the past 13 years. She is the co-founder (with Julian Knowles) of the audio-visual mediatized performance group Macrophonics. Her recent work with Macrophonics, called Ghostships premiered at the Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island and involved the control of a lighting environment via wearable electronic controllers which were made and designed herself. Donna is a founding member of Lady Electronica, an all-female collective of self-producing musicians. Her work has attracted frequent funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, most recently with Lady Electronica. The collective presented a live showcase of their work at the Judith Wright Centre in Nov 2012 following a year of development with input from renowned artists including Scott Horscroft and Gotye. As part of the work with Lady Electronica, Donna helped design the wearable electronics for the artists in Lady Electronica and as part of her own performance collaborated with dance artists Zaimon and Lizzie Vilmanis.

Donna has undertaken a number of residencies including STEIM (Amsterdam) in 2010 – an internationally renowned centre for research and development of instruments & tools for performers in the electronic performance arts, as well as Legs on the Wall in 2012. Performance highlights include TES (Canada), ISEA, Brisbane Festival, SEAM, Understanding Visual Music (Canada), ICMC (USA, Ireland, UK), Liquid Architecture, Great Escape Festival, dis-orientation, sound-no-sound, and 1/4 Inch sound performance series.

Donna holds a PhD in music and has held academic positions at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Queensland University of Technology. She is currently the Bachelor of Music Course Coordinator in the School of Arts at UNE.