From County Down in Northern Ireland, Amelia (b. 1995) currently works between Belfast and Manchester. Her music is described as “inherent elusiveness… beautifully captured” (Het Parool), blending folk influences with contemporary timbres, exploring modern issues through the lens of nature, mythology and literature.
Spanning stage and concert hall, Amelia's music has been performed across the UK, Ireland and Netherlands including at Ireland's National Concert Hall, Opera Holland Park, Southbank Centre, Elgar Concert Hall, King's Place, Hugh Lane Gallery, Wigmore Hall, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Lyric Belfast and The MAC Belfast. Through 2024-25, Amelia composed three orchestral works for Ireland's National Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra, making history as the youngest commissioned female composer in the Ulster Orchestra's history with the premiere of commission The Rain Keeps Coming at the Ulster Hall in October 2025. Other recent highlights include music for Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble, Crash Ensemble, Central Band of the Royal Air Force and for performers including pianist Lana Bode, soprano Alison Langer and harpist Oliver Wass. In 2026, she will be composing a commission for Scotland's Hebrides Ensemble and working on a new opera supported by Arts Council Ireland.
Dance forms a large portion of Amelia's practice. As Co-Founder and Composer in Residence of Six Dance Collective, she has scored film for mobile application Corners (2023), 2-act ballet White Doves (2023, The MAC) and The View from Mars (2025, Lyric Belfast). In 2024, her work Ephemeral with choreographer Wubkje Kuindersma commissioned by the Dutch National Ballet and Dutch National Ballet Orchestra for the Junior Company's 10th Anniversary, toured the Netherlands to fifteen venues. Amelia is the 2022 Mendelssohn Scholar. Awarded to a composer for for advanced study since 1856, this scholarship supports her current PhD at the Royal Northern College of Music, supervised by Laura Bowler and Gary Carpenter. Amelia's research is centered on the reorientaton of her practice through composing new music for dance. Amelia gratefully acknowledges further support from the RNCM which makes her doctoral research possible.
Amelia is a 2026 RPS Composer and the recipient of the 2021 National Concert Hall and Sounding the Feminists's Commissioning Award. Further support for Amelia's creative practice includes the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, PRS Foundation Women Make Music, Vaughan Willians Foundation and Hinrichsen Foundation. In 2024, she became a Composer with Music Patron, Sound and Music’s initiative to reimagine music patronage for the 21st century. She is represented by Contemporary Music Centre Ireland as an Associate Composer.
Amelia's music carries influences from her early influences from traditional Irish folk music and classical training as a soprano and flautist. She took Music at Cardiff University, graduating in 2017 with first class honours. From 2017-19 she completed her Masters of Music in Composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance with distinction. As a Trinity College London Scholar and with the support of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, she studied under Deirdre Gribbin, Errollyn Wallen CBE, Edward Jessen and John Ashton Thomas. In November 2018, Amelia received the Worshipful Company of Musicians' 2018 Medal for Trinity Laban, joining the prestigious Yeomen Young Artist Programme as the first composer to receive the medal for the college.
