Magnus Westwell is a Scottish artist and director working with choreography, composition and performance. Spanning the euphoric and desolate, Westwell’s work seeks to understand and express states of cathartic transformation through embodied sound.

Exploring cycles of liminality, transcendence, and absence, Westwell works within ethereal, dream-like worlds, where decaying and generative processes aim to challenge the limits of emotional and physical experience, revealing cascading states of collapse and transformation, and researching the essence of memory, consciousness, fragility, ephemerality, time, and loss. Westwell’s practice unfolds through an ongoing dialogue between movement and sound, where choreography and composition evolve in response to one another. In the studio, sound works are composed alongside the development of choreography, with music emerging from the presence of dancers in space. This reciprocal process allows movement to shape sound as much as sound shapes movement, creating a cyclical exchange between the disciplines. Westwell’s practice has been shaped by time living in Orkney, London, and Glasgow, where they are currently based.

Magnus Westwell is a Sadler’s Wells Young Associate alumni, and their work has reached a diversity of venues, institutions, galleries and festivals across Europe and the UK, including Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Britten Pears Arts, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Cafe OTO, Number 1 Main Road Berlin, Institute of the Arts Barcelona and Amsterdam Dance Event, with digital work published and premiered across Nowness, Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage and FACT Magazine.

Magnus Westwell created interdisciplinary stage work Sunder, which premiered to sold out audiences at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 2022, and was subsequently released as Westwell’s debut LP. In the same year, Westwell performed for Virgil Abloh’s SS22 Louis Vuitton collection campaign, and composed the soundtrack for Paolo Carzana’s London Fashion Week show. In 2023, Westwell was commissioned by BUILDHOLLYWOOD for the opening of their new performance space in East London; Westwell developed a new 25 minute work Broken Light Of My Heart which premiered on the Autumn Equinox - it was described by culture and music journalist Emma Warren as “radical, momentous, thrilling and exceptionally moving”.

In 2024, Magnus Westwell performed with Scratchproof Orchestra at Turner Contemporary for the closing of Mark Leckey’s In The Offing; featured in Marianna Simnett’s WINNER, exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin; and collaborated with BULLYACHE, composing and performing string arrangements for their live performances at Elgar Concert Hall, Bold Tendencies, Barbican and Abbey Road Studios. Westwell was Artist in Residence at Britten Pears Arts and The Mandrake Hotel in April 2024.

Westwell premiered performance work Caught at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in 2025, later presenting the work at FOLD during Frieze London. Combining choreography and live musical performance, Caught is realised through sonically layered, ethereal environments in which the body moves through emotional states to the point of catharsis. In 2025, Westwell presented WEIGHT, a duo exhibition with British painter Marcus Nelson at Number 1 Main Road, Berlin. The exhibition featured Westwell’s experimental short films And Then Gone and Cycles (III).