Cat Hope

Catherine Anne "Cat" Hope (born 11 March 1966), is an Australian composer, musician and academic. She started her music and academic careers in Perth and relocated to Melbourne in 2017. Her opera, Speechless, was first performed in 2019 at the Perth Festival. At the Art Music Awards of 2020 she won Work of the Year: Dramatic for Speechless. Steve Dow of The Age described the opera, "fuelled by outrage over the imprisonment of asylum seeker children, which features growling and screaming to an unconventional score without musical notation." Hope has also won the Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music in 2011 for Decibel's 2009–2010 Annual Programs and in 2014 for her Drawn from Sound exhibition.