© Pia Johnson
“Wit, sensuality and mind-boggling flamboyance”
— The Guardian
Musician and arts advocate Genevieve Lacey connects people and ideas through sound, creating and performing multi-artform pieces that combine her skills as performer, composer, and curator. Her poetic, sensual works are experienced in concert halls, public art settings, as installations, in film, theatre, dance, radio, TV, and the digital realm.  

Works include Breathing Space (a permanent sound installation for the National Museum of Australia), Consort of the Moon (a massed choral ritual), Pleasure Garden (a listening garden), Recorder Queen (a semi-animated documentary film), and Soliloquy (a re-invention of the solo recital). Current collaborators include writer Alexis Wright, visual artist Amos Gebhardt, composer-improviser Erkki Veltheim and Antarctic scientist Steven Chown.

As a recorder virtuoso, Genevieve makes regular appearances as a soloist with Australian and international orchestras including the Australian Chamber Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, Tapiola Sinfonietta, Concerto Copenhagen, the Melbourne, Tasmanian and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras and Melbourne Chamber Orchestra. She has performed at the Lindau International Convention of Nobel Laureates, for Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey, as a concerto soloist in the Royal Albert Hall for BBC Proms, at the opening night of the London Jazz Festival and on a basketball court on Thursday Island with Australian indigenous ensemble The Black Arm Band.

An advocate for her instrument as well as for contemporary composition, Genevieve has commissioned and premiered works by composers as wide-ranging as Australians Lou Bennett, Brett Dean, Elena Kats-Chernin, Andrea Keller, Hollis Taylor, Paul Grabowsky, Liza Lim and Ben Frost, as well as Erkki-Sven Tüür (Estonia), John Surman (UK), Max de Wardener (UK), Jan Bang (Norway), Christian Fennesz (Germany) and Wang Peng (China).

Genevieve is currently artistic director for Finding Our Voice and artistic advisor to UKARIA Cultural Centre. Her curatorial expertise has been sought out by LiveWorks (Performance Space 2020-22), Rising (2019-20), Adelaide Festival (2019), and Melbourne Recital Centre, where she was artist-in-residence (2018). She serves on the board of A New Approach and was the Chair of the Australian Music Centre (2016-21). With an extensive and ever-expanding discography, she has won Australian Recording Industry awards (ARIA), Helpmann and Green Room awards, Churchill, Freedman and Australia Council Fellowships, the Melbourne Prize for Music (Outstanding Musician Award),  and the Sidney Myer Individual Performing Arts Award.

“Wit, sensuality and mind-boggling flamboyance”
— The Guardian
“The incomparable Genevieve Lacey”
— The Australian
“Superlative musicianship, beguiling tone and masterful flexibility”
— The Age