Cathy van Eck (1979 Belgium/Netherlands) is a composer, sound artist, andresearcher in the arts. She focuses on composing relationships between everyday objects, human performers, and sound. Her artistic work includes performances with live-electronics and installations with sound objects which she often designs herself. She is interested in setting her gestures into unusual and surprising relationships with sounds, mainly by electronic means. The result could be called “performative sound art”, since it combines elements from performance art, electronic music, and visual arts. Her work transcends genres and is presented at occasions as diverse as experimental or electronic music concerts, open air rockfestivals, sound art gallery venues, digital art events, or performance art festivals. Cathy is working closely with performers to develop her pieces and she often works in interdisciplinary fields, collaborating regularly with theatre directors and choreographers. Her projects are shown at festivals and venues all over the world such as NYCEMF New York (USA), Chronus Art Gallery Shanghai (China), BONE Performance Art Festival Berne(Switzerland), Klangwerkstatt Berlin (Germany), Hapzura Digital Art Festival (Israel), Avantgarde Schwaz (Austria), Eclat Festival Stuttgart (Germany), SPARK Minneapolis (USA), STEIM Amsterdam and November Music (Netherlands), Spaziomusica Cagliari (Italy), and the Munich Biennale (Germany). Since 2007, Cathy has a teaching position at the Department for Music and Media Arts of the University of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland. She is aregular guest lecturer at other art and music universities. In her PhD research »Between Air« and »Electricity« (supervisors Richard Barrett, Marcel Cobussen and Frans de Ruiter; accepted in 2013 by the University o fLeiden, The Netherlands), she investigated the use of microphones and loudspeakers as musical instruments. She is one of the nominees for the Swiss Music Prize 2015.

She took part in the junior studies program for gifted students at the Dresden University of Music, and studied dramaturgy at the Theaterakademie August Everding under Professor Klaus Zehelein; she received a grant from the German National Academic Foundation and a scholarship from DAAD to study at Université Paris 8.

She has been working as a freelance dramaturge for music theater as of the season 2012/13, and in 2014 she was a consultant in the opera department at Bayer Kultur. She has worked as a music journalist for several CD labels and has been a freelance author since 2014 for music theater and early music at the radio broadcaster WDR 3.

She is a freelance dramaturge in the area of music theater with a focus on ›project development‹ and she has worked in this capacity at, among other institutions, Prinzregententheater and the Gasteig Cultural Center in Munich; Radialsystem Berlin; Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Hellerau; the Aix-en-Provence festival; De Nationale Opera Amsterdam; Aldeburgh Music; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; LOD muziektheater Ghent; Polish National Opera Teatr Wielki (performances, among others, at La Monnaie/De Munt, Philharmonie de Paris); Staatstheater Darmstadt; Nederlandse Reisopera; Kölner Philharmonie; and the International Festival of Contemporary Music of the Biennale di Venezia. She received a grant from Akademie »Musiktheater heute«, the academy of the Deutsche Bank Foundation.

Grew up in Hungary and Switzerland. She studied stage and film design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. During and after her studies she worked in numerous productions as assistant for stage design to Anna Viebrock, at Theater Basel, the Wiener Festwochen and the Volksbühne Berlin.

After graduating, she worked for three years as stage designer in Osnabrück, Heidelberg, at Garage X in Vienna and at Kaserne Basel. Since summer semester 2014, she studies directing for theater and opera at the Theatre Academy August Everding in Munich under Prof. Sebastian Baumgarten. Until now she realized two productions at the Theatre Academy: Decalogue VI based on the film by Kristof Kieslowski and War and war based on the novel by hungarian author László Krasznahorkai. 

Claudia Irro, born in 1985 in Munich, studied costume design at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences under Professor Reinhard von der Thannen. After working as an assistant on productions of Christoph Marthaler; Sebastian Baumgarten; and Benedikt von Peter, among others, she has been working as a freelance costume designer since 2011 at Theater Basel; Staatsschauspiel Dresden; Nationaltheater Mannheim; Münchner Volkstheater; Schauspielhaus Graz; and Theater Rampe in Stuttgart in collaboration with, among others, Frederik Tidén; Marie Bues; Simon Solberg; Jan Gehler; and Alexander Eisenach. After working on an opera production at Biwako Hall in Japan in 2012, (directed by Georges Delnon and in coproduction with Theater Basel), there followed a film and opera production at ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Schwetzinger SWR Festspiele (world premiere in 2014). She also designed the costumes for music theater productions at Kaserne Basel; Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich ("Enzyklopädie"); and for the opera production "Ulysse Exp. No. 1," which will have its world premiere in Lausanne at BCV Concert Hall.