I am multi-arts practitioner, writer, and scholar originally from London UK. I studied music at Cambridge University as an undergraduate and then moved to the United States to do a PhD in Music History in New York at Columbia University where I was subsequently a post-doctoral scholar in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. After New York I lived briefly in New Orleans and since 2003 I have been in Buffalo NY, where I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo. I was also a visiting professor at NYU for the Spring of 2015.

Artistically I work as a poet, opera librettist (in collaboration with composers including Diana Soh and Clara Latham), performance artist (including in collaboration with groups such as Wooden Cities), dramatist, installation artist, and painter and drawer. The work has been commissioned by and performed in a variety of venues. Including globally, at IRCAM (at the Pompidou Center, Paris), on Radio France, with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, by the Ensemble Intercontemporain at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and at the Tête á Tête festival in London. And in the United States including at Roulette in Brooklyn and in Buffalo at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and as part of the Western New York arts initiative QBaL (Queer Bodies as Landscape), of which I am co-director and curator with John Santomieri.

My artistic work addresses a large range of issues, often by means of an abject poetry hovering between tragedy and comedy and teetering at the point where abstraction tips into narrative and representation. But it is repeatedly and increasingly concerned with the existential questions attendant on mental illness and distress. I have sought to make of my artistic practice a queer means of inhabiting rather than curing such conditions. Such ideas also form the basis of my memoir-driven, public facing intellectual book Doing Nothing, which appeared in 2026 in the Practices Series, edited by Margret Grebowicz, from Duke University Press.

As a scholar my profile is more that of an erudite generalist. Working at the points of intersection between art, politics, and philosophy, my critically-driven research has consistently worked across the divides that continue to define the disciplines, and has sought to address pressing concerns relevant to a world where we are bombarded with too much and expected to do too much about it. I have been drawn therefore to the queer project of championing those things that are useless and performed for their own sake, that fail of don’t achieve anything, and that are more on the side of being than doing.