MATTHEW WHITTET

Matthew is an actor and writer who has worked extensively in theatre, film and television for the past twenty years. Matt’s first play Twelve was workshopped at the National Playwrights Conference in Perth, 2006. His second was Silver, directed by Ben Winspear for Belvoir downstairs in which he also performed solo. In 2010 two further plays premiered in Adelaide; Fugitive (Windmill) and Harbinger (Brink Productions) beginning what has become an ongoing creative bond with the city and its audiences. In the same year, Matt was the Philip Parsons Young Playwright Award recipient sparking the development of the play Old Man which premiered downstairs in Belvoir’s 2012 season. Matt’s collaboration with Windmill has resulted in four plays with Girl Asleep being the most recent. Its predecessors are the Helpmann and Sydney Theatre Awards winning School Dance and Trilogy stable mate Big Bad Wolf. All three of these plays were concurrently performed at the Adelaide Festival (2014). Matt’s two-hander Cinderella garnered outstanding reviews at the close of 2014 in the Belvoir downstairs space and the premiere of his 2015 play Seventeen was a huge success in the upstairs theatre. In 2017 it had a season at London’s Lyric Hammersmith Theatre.

Matt’s feature film adaptation of his play Girl Asleep (supported by The Hive Production Fund) debuted at the Adelaide Film Festival and went on to open the 2016 Generation 14plus Programme at Berlin International Film Festival. It also won The Age Critics’ Award for best film at Melbourne International Film Festival, the 2016 CinefestOz Prize, the Australian Film Critics Association award for Best Film and the Seattle Film Festival Grand and Youth Jury Prizes. Its release in nationally and internationally was followed by a free to air screening on ABC TV. Matt’s play Fight with All Your Might the Zombies of The Night, winner of the 2015 Foundation Commission Award, premiered at ATYP in November 2016. Matt was among the seven Sidney Myer Creative Fellows chosen in 2012 and he is currently adapting his play School Dance to feature.