Projects
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![Gillian conducting musicians during outdoor workshop](https://www.gillianhowell.com.au/wp-content/uploads/slide-08.jpg)
BUILDING COMMUNITY THROUGH CREATIVITY
Innovative music workshops and massed music-making opportunities for all ages and all abilities, created for international festivals, arts centres, schools, and celebratory community events. These events emphasise inclusion, active participation, and place-based creativity.
![Gillian teaching young children to play the xylophone](https://www.gillianhowell.com.au/wp-content/uploads/slide-06.jpg)
CREATIVE SPACES IN POST-WAR SETTINGS
Creative music-making programs in post-conflict and developing countries offer outlets for creative, playful, and emotional expression; facilitate the rebuilding of social connections; and create space for imagining and enacting an alternative reality. Program sites include post-war Timor-Leste, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Republic of Georgia, and Sri Lanka on behalf of development NGOs.
![](https://www.gillianhowell.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Best-CELS-photos-Gillian-17-Dec-2012-227.jpg)
SUPPORTING POSITIVE SETTLEMENT FOR NEW ARRIVALS
Workshop residencies with recently-arrived refugee and immigrant cohorts use music to support feelings of connection, school engagement, literacy and oral language development, self-regulated forms of expression, and a safe medium for exploring and connecting their memories and recent past with the new present and future.
![Gillian conducting musicians](https://www.gillianhowell.com.au/wp-content/uploads/project-thumb-01.jpg)
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT FOR ORCHESTRAS
Player development programs and collaborative projects that bring orchestral musicians into schools, hospitals, prisons, theatre collaborations, post-conflict communities, and more. I was the founder and first Creative Director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s award-winning Community Outreach Program (2002-2009) and have consulted on similar programs for other orchestras, ensembles and music training institutions.
PRINCIPLES AND APPROACH
Facilitating agentic voice and creativity is a central goal, and outcomes include songs, instrumental works, music theatre, and sound art. I’ve worked in prisons, hospitals, immigration detention, refugee camps, kindergartens, and with recently-arrived young people recovering from wartime experiences. I’ve presented and MCd orchestral concerts for children and led large-scale outdoor music jams for up to 1000 people. I’ve created place-based music installations that soothe and heal, and composed/performed music for theatre and dance. Currently (2017-2020) I am Artist-in-Residence for Tura New Music’s ‘Music in Community’ program, working twice a year in the remote Aboriginal township of Fitzroy Crossing on the edge of Australia’s Great Sandy Desert to develop collaborative music projects in the community towards creative agency and wellbeing.