Philip Venables is a collaborative composer of opera. He won the 2016 UK Theatre Award for Opera, the 2017 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Large-scale Composition and was nominated for the Olivier Award and South Bank Award for Best Opera.
His most recent music-theatre work, The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, was developed at MacDowell in 2017 and is currently touring Europe (NYC in Fall 2025) since its premiere in summer 2023 at Manchester International Festival, UK. Venables has written three operas to date: 4.48 Psychosis (2016, text: Sarah Kane); Denis & Katya (2019, text: Ted Huffman); and The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions (2023, text: Ted Huffman after Larry Mitchell).
At MacDowell in 2017, Venables collaborated with Ted Huffman on Denis and Katya, and Faggots and their Friends. During his 2024 Fellowship, Venables worked on the score for his forthcoming opera We Are The Lucky Ones to be premiered at Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam, in March 2025 with its German premiere in August 2024 at the Ruhrtriennale. This will be his fourth opera and first with orchestra.
Portrait by Harald Hoffmann
