Conor Mitchell

Conor Mitchell is a multi-award-winning opera and music-theatre composer, librettist, and stage director, renowned for blending stage design with contemporary visual arts. Based in Belfast, his work engages audiences through socially relevant, politically charged subjects.

A double Ivor Novello British Composer Awards nominee, Mitchell has received the Arts Council Northern Ireland Major Individual Artists Award and is a life fellow of the Arts Foundation for composition.

Mitchell’s opera Abomination: a DUP Opera – which came to the Southbank Centre in 2023 – was listed in the Top Ten Classical Works of 2019 and won Best Opera Production at the 2020 Irish Times Theatre Awards. Among his most notable recent orchestral works are his Queer Mass and Riot Symphony, both premiered by the Ulster Orchestra.

Notable collaborations by the artist include the Rome, Holland, Edinburgh, and Aldeburgh festivals, the National Theatre, and Irish National Opera. Recently, Mitchell has been Composer in Residence at Wexford Opera and a Seamus Heaney Writer’s Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. More recently he has collaborated on new works for Cologne Opera, the Abbey Theatre Dublin, Festival de Marseille and Outburst Queer Arts Festival.

Mitchell is the founder and Artistic Director of the award winning Belfast Ensemble, who premiere his latest music-theatre work in 2026.