Award-Winning Composer Penelope Axtens Appointed To Creative NZ Lilburn Residency

Penelope Axtens has been announced as the 2025 Creative New Zealand (CNZ) New Zealand School of Music—Te Kōkī (NZSM) Composer-in-Residence at the Lilburn Residence.

Penelope, who studied composition at the University of Auckland before completing a Masters degree with Ross Harris and John Psathas at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, came to national prominence when she won the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Radio NZ Concert’s Music 2000 Prize with her work Part the Second. Shortly afterwards she moved to London, where she was based until 2010, when she relocated to Berlin and became a senior international marketing and promotion manager with Sony Classical. In 2024, she returned to New Zealand to live and reconnect with her home country.

Her recent creative work includes Sketch for solo cello, commissioned and premiered in 2024 by the Russian-born, German-based cellist Anastasia Kobekina, Make the Decision for solo harp (written for Eleonora Congiu, harpist with the Belgian National Orchestra), and Emic for solo piano, commissioned and recorded by New Zealand pianist Henry Wong Doe in 2023 for his CNZ-funded ‘Perspectives’ project.

The nine-month residency will allow her to reconnect with the music community in Aotearoa while living at the former residence of Douglas Lilburn, a heritage-listed modernist house in Thorndon that has been a peaceful haven for composers since 2005. The Lilburn Residence Trust will welcome Penelope into the house in early March.

Penelope says, “I am genuinely thrilled and honoured to be selected Composer-in-Residence for 2025. I am very grateful to Creative New Zealand, the Lilburn Residence Trust and the NZSM for this exceptional opportunity to compose fulltime while living at the celebrated Lilburn Residence. Having recently returned to Aotearoa New Zealand, this residency feels wonderfully timed for me, and I am very much looking forward to creating new music that explores themes of identity and belonging, while reconnecting with the NZSM and creative communities in Wellington.”

Professor Kim Cunio, Head of School at the NZSM, says that he and his colleagues are delighted that Penelope will be taking up the CNZ residency, describing her as “an award-winning composer with a distinguished career in Europe since 2002”. He says, “Her thoughtful, coherent work proposal captivated the selection panel with its clear vision for a residency that engaged both with the Lilburn Residence—the former home of Douglas Lilburn in Thorndon where she will be based—as well as staff and students of the NZSM and wider Wellington arts communities. It promises to be a deeply fulfilling, highly collaborative, and transformative period for her.”

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