About Us - Branch Nebula

We revel in the glamour of the everyday and the mundane.

We deliver daring performance projects that challenge audiences, peers, collaborators and partners.

Every project leads us into new territory: pushing the boundaries of what is considered performance.

Team

BN is led by founding artists Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters. Wilson has 35 years’ experience performing, directing and choreographing, having trained at the University of Western Sydney’s Theatre Nepean. His credits include Post Arrivalists, Acrobat, and dramaturgy with Nick Power’s dance productions. Wouters is a Belgian/Australian designer, educated in industrial design with 23 years’ experience making work for large-scale outdoor and indoor theatre with her signature use of found space, recycled costume and light. Together they have developed an astonishing body of work that has toured festivals and presentation houses around Europe, Asia, South America and Australia.

In 2024 Michaela Coventry joined the Branch Nebula team as company producer. Michaela brings over 25 years’ experience in arts and artist management. She is currently the Director of Sage Arts working with artists and organisations including Jo Lloyd, Matthias Schack-Arnott, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Branch Nebula. In recent years she has been the Executive Producer of The Substation, Lucy Guerin Inc, Speak Percussion and Megafun and Producer of Marrugeku/Stalker (2004-2005) and of Performance Space in Sydney (2000-2003).

Mirabelle Wouters

Co-Artistic Director

Lee Wilson

Co-Artistic Director

Michaela Coventry

Company Producer

There are many lines you can follow in Branch Nebula’s work over the past 20 years. There’s the way they work the body – the special things it can do, the training regimes it can submit to, its cracks and flaws. There are the spaces this body can inhabit and be seen – stages, plazas, parks, and faux plazas and parks on stages. And there is the audience: what it wants from these bodies and spaces. And running through all the work is a passion for the vulnerable and the marginal.

–John Baylis, Branch Nebula: Seeking Flow, 2019

Work

Established in 1999 Branch Nebula is a distinct voice in Australian performance culture. We have enjoyed international success and have been presented by major cultural institutions, yet our work resists easy consumption. We are driven by a deep dissatisfaction with the hierarchies that shape the world, the structures that rank and grade, the barriers that warp and constrain. We value the devalued, spotlight the marginal, and celebrate the clefts in the concrete where the weeds push through. And we have fun with this. In the windy space between the car park and the shopping mall, in the graffitied underpass, and in the piss-stained stairwell built then abandoned, we find pockets of paradise.

What fuels us as artists is going to skate, BMX, and breakdance comps, protest marches, vogue balls, book clubs, crochet circles, punk gigs, bush walks, dance parties, and shopping at the mall.

– Lee Wilson & Mirabelle Wouters, Co-Artistic Directors

Commissioning Partners

Since 1999, we have staged 15 major productions, curated 4 major live art events, toured work to 40 cities worldwide, and employed 107 artists, including 55 culturally and linguistically diverse artists, and 61 young and emerging artists. Our presenters span Europe, Latin America, the UK and Asia, and we develop ongoing relationships through workshops, residencies and collaborations.

Funding Partners

Branch Nebula Incorporated is assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts funding and advisory body; and by the NSW Government through Create NSW.