Born in Wales in 1969, brought up in Warwickshire, Julian Philips studied music at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is one of Britain’s most versatile composers. His music has been performed across the world at festivals and venues including the BBC Proms, Tanglewood Music Festival, Welsh National Opera, Glyndebourne and Wigmore Hall, by international artists including Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Evelyn Glennie, the Vertavo String Quartet and BBC orchestras.

A vital force in education, Philips is Head of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama where he was made Honorary Fellow in 2007 and conferred a Professorship in 2014. He was responsible for creating a new Masters Programme in Opera-Making & Writing and a Doctoral Composer-in-Residence scheme in association with the Royal Opera House, which most recently supported the creation of Oliver Leith's Last Days.

Recent projects include his children’s opera Henny Penny (2020), Autumn Songs (2021) for the Little Missenden Festival, and The Country of Larks (2021) for tenor, horn and piano commissioned by Oxford Lieder Festival. In 2022, his music featured at the Presteigne Festival, including the premiere of Looking West, which celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vaughan Williams.

"I hope New Opera Dialogues will enable us to discover new colleagues, kindred spirits, to investigate our collective experience training Opera Makers, and share individual creative practice. I hope to reframe my own work in wider European/international contexts.

Burning Questions: How can we strive for good collaborative practice/creative equality in New Opera, build bridges between educational contexts and the Opera world, and how can we widen access/build diversity, enabling new stories to be explored?

Current Challenges: How do we support training in New Opera in a harsh economic and political climate? How can we resource Opera Makers with the time/space they need? How do we encourage main-scale Opera Companies to see developing new work as fundamental to their raison d’être?"