(Composer and Director)

Mat Diafos Sweeney is an Ovation Award-winning performance maker from Los Angeles. His practice includes directing, choreographing, designing, composing music, and writing/collaging texts to make new theatre. He creates through-composed performance work for multi-disciplinary ensembles, often devised and staged in non-theatrical venues. He has been independently producing work as four larks since 2008, with an evolving coterie of collaborators across the US and Australia. His most recent projects include undine, a New Music USA supported ecofeminist songspiel in a converted flower shop downtown, and katabasis, a processional opera staged around the grounds and gardens of the Getty Villa, styled after ancient mystery rites. In the coming year he will continue his ongoing series of site-specific performance activations for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, present his participatory installation song cycle hymns, and premiere his new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s frankenstein at the Wallis.