About

Dr. Donna Hewitt is a vocalist, electronic music composer instrument designer and academic. Donna’s research has been primarily exploring mediatized performance environments and new ways of interfacing the human body and voice with electronic media. She is the inventor of the eMic, a sensor enhanced microphone stand for electronic music performance and more recently has been creating wearable electronics for controlling both sound and lighting in performance. Her work has attracted funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, most recently with all female collective Lady Electronica. Donna has held academic positions at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Queensland, University of Technology and is currently the Head of Creative Arts and Communication and the Coordinator of the Bachelor of Music at the University of New England, Sydney Australia. In 2018 Donna performed her work as part of the VIVID Festival, and The Bondi Feast Festival and in 2018 she presented her work at the MINT (Music in New Technologies) Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She recently performed her collaborative work #Me Too at SFGA in Tokyo and at the Convergence Festival of Technology and New Ideas in Leicester, UK.

Reviews and Quotes

 “…her delicious voice transformed before us into shimmering electronica…” (Small Black Box)

“Hewitt’s velvety voice pines and purrs, fractured, delayed and panned by strokes, caresses and sways of the stand” (Realtime)

“Hewitt’s morphed voice emerges into dreamy awareness. The aesthetic here is in the electronic orchestration of musical and non-musical fragments into a seductive song” (Realtime)

“…the best sounding sounds to come out of the speakers at Small Black Box that I’ve heard in a long time; experimental music without experimental production…” (Small Black Box)

“Idol” is simply good! And quite special. Thankyou for bringing it to us. (Eldad Tsabary curator UVM2011 Montreal Canada, August 30th 10:22pm)

“Hewitt comes from a pop/rock music background and her two pieces were unabashedly tonal with luscious harmonic layering reaching an almost symphonic scale. The control offered by the eMic is particularly impressive, allowing Hewitt to generate this complexly looped and layered composition without once returning to the laptop.(ISEAS2013 review, Realtime)