Deborah Conway’s diverse career encompasses recording, performing, composing and acting. Her trademark entrepreneurial spirit has forged innovative collaborations of variety and depth. In May 2008, Deborah was appointed Artistic Director of Queensland Music Festival.

Deborah has been a prominent member of the Australian music scene ever since her first band Do Re Mi topped the charts in 1985 with the single Man Overboard and album, Domestic Harmony.

Deborah’s first solo album String Of Pearls (1991), reached platinum sales, the second, Bitch Epic (1993), achieved gold sales. This was her debut collaboration with Willy Zygier. They went on to make Ultrasound (1995) a band project with the late Paul Hester of Crowded House; My Third Husband (1997) written and recorded in London; Exquisite Stereo (2000) featuring a duet with Neil Finn; PC – The Songs Of Patsy Cline (2001) and Only The Bones (best of, 2002). Deborah’s most recent release, Summertown, is her 8th solo studio album.

Deborah has also made high profile screen and stage detours along the way: director Peter Greenaway (Draughtsman's Contract) cast her in his film Prospero's Books as the goddess Juno, singing the score by Michael Nyman; Pete Townshend of The Who cast her in his musical, The Iron Man, alongside Nina Simone and John Lee Hooker; and Geoffrey Rush directed her in his Belvoir Street theatre production of Aristophanes Frogs alongside Toni Collette. In 2001, Deborah starred as the title role in Always… Patsy Cline, touring nationally to rave reviews.

The last few years have seen a increase in the scope of her collaborative work, from writing with classical composer George Dreyfus, to recording with Brisbane band george; from appearing with Paul Grabowsky and the Australian Art Orchestra to reinterpreting Paul Kelly for the Women At The Well compilation.

In 2005 Deborah devised, produced and performed in Broad, a stage show exploring the extraordinary talents of Australia’s key female singer songwriters such as Katie Noonan, Clare Bowditch, Sara Storer and Ruby Hunter. Broad has since gone on to become part of the national musical calendar, with annual sell out shows across the country.

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LETTER FROM DEBORAH

In 2009 Queensland turns 150; its musical traditions demonstrate a century and a half of changing styles and fashions in the western world. But what we now call Queensland is millennia older than that, with music that reaches back to the Dreamtime. What a great basis for a music festival. And that’s just for starters — 150 years have given these cultures plenty of opportunities to grab each other and dance cheek to cheek to new rhythms, making new harmonies.

Birthdays are a good time to reflect on the past and consider the future; this July we will lovingly put Queensland under the historical microscope while also aiding and abetting some adventurous notions of an imagined future in musical form.

We’ll explore sound in its many varieties and push boundaries in creating music from sounds not necessarily regarded as musical.

This year’s Queensland Music Festival brings people from opposite sides of the globe together for the first time. We will experience the exchange, the collision of old and new and the similarities of sonic worlds that have developed so far apart and yet share a commonality both surprising and moving.

After all, what is music but the purest expression of humanity?