Chloe Knibbs is a composer, songwriter and sound artist whose work is deeply rooted in lyricism and vulnerability. Drawing from a range of  feminist and interdisciplinary influences, her portfolio spans opera, music theatre, songwriting, choral and chamber works, sound art and electroacoustic pieces. 

With a particular interest in working with text, her work is often developed through long standing collaborations with musicians, artists or ensembles, such as Pace New Music. This approach has underpinned a range of interdisciplinary projects, which have received support from Jerwood Arts, the PRS Women Make Music Scheme, Arts Council England Development Your Creative Practice and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Drummond and Lockyer Award for Research and Development. Her work has also been performed at Flatpack Film Festival, Birmingham Weekender and Cheltenham Music Festival with commissioners including the Illuminate Womens’ Music, Marian Consort, Lilith Ensemble and British Council Music. 

A central theme to Chloe’s practice is an engagement with dead women composers, forming new connections with the past through new creative work.  “Clara”, a choral work which engaged with C19th pianist-composer Clara Schumann’s relationship with composition, written on Making Music’s Adopt A Composer Scheme 2018/19 and later broadcast on BBC Radio 3. In a similar vein the “Ruins” electroacoustic series,  a used the metaphor of decay and erosion to challenge tropes surrounding women composers and the notion of legacy, with a specific focus on the following C19th French composers: Marie Jaëll, Augusta Holmès and Clémence de Grandval (ACE Developing Your Creative Practice, Jerwood Arts). This approach continues to be developed through the PhD project “Readdressing the Spectacle: Composing Connections Between Past and Living Women Composers Through Collage” at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and University of Birmingham, supported by the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. This project has a particular focus on music theatre and dance theatre, as well as electroacoustic composition and spatial audio. 

She also enjoys cross-cultural and international collaboration and has been a sound artist/composer in residence at the Ting Shuo Studio (Tainan, Taiwan), the Visby Composers’ Centre (Sweden) and Kopanize Bez Hranice Festival  (Slovakia).  Other workshops attended include Rimini Protokoll’s 24 Timelines Performing at t KlangKunstBühne (Universität der Künste Berlin), the Magnus Composers’ Course (Orkney Arts Festival) , Benjamin Thigpen’s Intro to Max MSP (Musique et Recherches, Belgium) and Philip Venables Composing for Stage (CampFR). 

Chloe holds a MusB (Hons) in Music from the University of Manchester and a Masters in Composition from the Birmingham Conservatoire, where she studied with Joe Cutler. Mentors also include Linda O’Keefe, Alwynne Pritchard, Robert Fokkens, Lisa Neher and Colin Riley. Chloe is also a member of the Musicians’ Union, the Royal Opera House’s Engender Network and PRS.