Danaë Killian is an Australian pianist whose poetry-infused performances have found regard internationally for their intense originality and rare communicative power. Her repertoire ranges across the complete solo piano music of the Second Viennese School, major polyphonic works by JS Bach, and a wealth of Australian compositions. A passionate champion of modern art music, Danaë Killian has delivered around a hundred world premieres, performing throughout Europe, China and the USA, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. She has been the recipient of prestigious awards for her musical and academic prowess, including the Australian Alumni (W G Walker) Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship, the Helen Macpherson Smith Scholarship, an Australian Postgraduate Award, and an Australia Award Endeavour Research Fellowship.

Danaë Killian is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she earned her PhD in 2010 with a dissertation on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as a modernist imagining of the harmony of the spheres. Her research project Transformations and Initiations: Sylvia Plath in Flames, in Performance resulted in three major performances produced between 2012 and 2015: Sylvia Plath in the Domestic Sublime, The Dove’s Annihilation, and The Flame and the Rose Folded Together, all of which explored the relationship between poetry and music, biography and art, potential and actual selves.

Danaë Killian’s recording Arnold Schoenberg: Complete Works for Piano Solo for the Move label was launched in 2015 to critical acclaim.

Photo by Karin Locke