Alex Ariel Paterson is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and creating on Gadigal Land in Sydney, Australia. Through intertwining multi-instrumentalism, composition, improvisation, theatre and poetry, their works manifest within spaces as small as a friend’s garden or your local pub, through theatres such as the Hayes Theatre to landmarks as grand as Sydney’s Opera House and Singapore’s Esplanade. Having engaged in tertiary study for Music Education (with Composition as a Principal Study) at the Sydney Conservatorium – including tutelage by the likes of Dr. Peter McNamara, Gerard Brophy, Ursula Caporali, Carl Vine, and Dr. James Humberstone, amongst others – education and music advocacy engaging people of all ages is at the core of Alex’s practice, from introducing infants to live music for their first time as part of the Sydney Opera House’s Kid’s Cafe program, teaching and creating resources within primary and high school string and band programs, and directing choirs of adults at the University of Sydney.
In 2025, alongside regularly performing as a collaborative instrumentalist with several other Sydney musicians, Alex performed in several musical theatre and opera productions on voice and violin, including Home Grown (Hayes Theatre Co., 2025), Songs for a New World (ACTiv Elite Theatre Co., 2025), Little Women (Company of Dramatic Arts, 2025), Nabucco (The Co-operative, 2025) and Bonny & Read (2025). Alex’s compositional works for 2025 include two performances with artist Wen Pei Low of their collaborative work 64 FUTURES (at Machine Hall, and at the UNSW Art & Design Annual Showcase), Alex’s component featuring live processing of violin and MIDI audio along with pre-recorded audio through modular synthesis, as well as live-manipulated modular synthesised audio. Alex also composed and recorded the soundtrack for the short film Til’ Death Do Us Part (Sally Ip, 2025), featuring live and MIDI instruments performed by Alex along with audio processing and manipulation. Alex also presented a collaborative work with Wen Pei Low at the Goodspace Gallery featuring both artists’ poetry and drawings in calligraphy ink on scrolls of paper, along with an improvised performance incorporating both artists playing musical instruments as each recited their respective poems.
Alex is also keenly interested in technology, photography, coffee, fashion, cars, birds, languages and cultures, queer rights, decolonisation, and just about anything else you could rant to them at length about with enough passion and enthusiasm. Alex也會説一點點中文。