Performer, composer / lyricist and musical activist Gwyneth Herbert has been hailed as one the most imaginative and idiosyncratic artists of her generation.

She has collaborated with communities, companies, artists, orchestras, academics, pole dancers and puppets to produce a huge canon of interdisciplinary work that, whilst challenging expectations, seeks to find dialogue with the world.

With community engagement at the heart of her practice, her work is rooted in a desire to reach across the divide, to question the binary, to hold both the shadow and the light and find the hope within.

Her seventh solo album, Letters I Haven’t Written, was accompanied by a multi-layered live show that explored the struggle for connection through film, narrative, soundscape and song. As a keystone of the project, Gwyneth met the untold stories of community groups around the country in Letters workshops. Participants then joined her onstage for each encore to sing out their musical “Letters” – listening, learning, making together.

She is also the co-creator of seven musicals, including the record-breaking productions of “A Christmas Carol” and “The Nutcracker” at Bristol Old Vic, with writer Tom Morris and director Lee Lyford.

Her arrangement of Swahili folk song Baiskeli yang, ehh  – taught to her by young people in workshops on the outskirts of Mombasa – was commissioned for Benjamin Britten’s centenary and simultaneously performed by 100,000 children worldwide.

Other composition work has involved major commissions from the London Sinfonietta, Mahogany Opera Group, Roman River Festival, Snape Maltings; with artist Mel Brimfield creating a Fun Palace at Stratford station, recruiting a choir on wheels in Sheffield and conducting her own film score at the BFI.