Rate My Professor Cat Hope

Professor Cat Hope is Professor and Research Director of Composition at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. She earned a Bachelor of Music (Performance) with Honours and a PhD in Art from RMIT University in 2010, titled "The Possibility of Infrasonic Music," which received the University Research Prize for Outstanding Thesis. Her career includes appointment as Head of the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music in 2017, directorship of the award-winning Decibel new music ensemble since 2009, and Visiting Professor at King's College London from 2022 to 2023. She has led the development of undergraduate degrees combining composition and music technology and established the Western Australian New Music Archive in 2015 through an Australian Research Council Linkage grant.

Cat Hope's research specializations encompass digital and graphic notation for music, music software development, gender and music, digital archives for Australian music, improvisation, music and activism, low frequency sound, and practice-based methodologies in music. She serves as Chief Investigator on projects including Digi-Score (2020–2026) and Diversifying Music in Australia (2021–2025). Her major awards and fellowships include the Distinguished Creative Researcher 2025 from the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts, Churchill Fellowship, Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship (2022–2023), APRA AMC Art Music Awards for Excellence in Experimental Music (2011, 2014), Victorian State Award for Excellence (2019), and Best New Work Dramatic for her opera 'Speechless' (2020), as well as the German Critics Prize for her 2017 monograph CD on Hat[Hut] label. Key publications feature the co-authored book 'Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media' (Bloomsbury, 2014), 'Artists’ perspectives: Experimental and electronic music in Australia' (2025, in The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia), 'Never at sea: an examination of collaboration and translation in a creative project about women's experiences of forced migration' (2025, Routledge), and 'Editorial: New Strategies for Music Notation and Representation in Electroacoustic Music' (2026, Organised Sound). She chairs the International Technologies of Music Notation and Representation (TENOR) conference, is President of the Deans and Directors of Creative Arts, was a member of the Australian Research Council Creative Arts and Humanities College of Experts (2017–2019), and contributes to editorial boards such as Bloomsbury Academic (2019–2021).