Paul Castles is an Australian-American composer based in Cape Town and New York. Defined by the collision of the ancient and the modern and underpinned by a passion for collaboration, Castles’ music has been seen across North America, Europe, Africa, East Asia, and Australia. Among his works are the award-winning musical The Fountain, created in collaboration with Namoo Chae Lee; Repast, a series of interactive musical installations about the interconnectedness of nature and memory; and The Percipients, an ongoing mixed reality exploration of the Bigfoot phenomenon with Sibyl Kempson.
Castles has been an artist-in-residence at UKARIA and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, a fellow of the Sundance Institute and the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
At MacDowell, Castles completed the first draft of The Diluted, a new music theater project, in collaboration with director and librettist Namoo Chae Lee. The project, which explores the last 24 hours of the life of Korean poet Yoon Dong-ju as his blood is replaced with seawater, is being developed with interdisciplinary performing arts group KASSNA KOLLEKTIV with a first presentation at the Bloomsbury Festival in October 2026.
