Magnus Westwell is a Scottish artist, director and multi-instrumentalist working with choreography, composition and performance. Spanning the euphoric and desolate, Westwell’s work seeks to understand and express the essence of ineffable emotional states, transcending fragility, intimacy and catharsis in movement and 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, researching ideas surrounding memory, consciousness, ephemerality, time and loss. 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, Institute of the Arts Barcelona and Amsterdam Dance Event. Their digital work has been 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, shot by Robbie Ryan and exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin; and collaborated with BULLYACHE, composing and performing string ensemble 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.

Magnus Westwell premiered performance work Caught at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in February 2025, in response to their exhibition showcasing the works of Berlin-based painter GALLI. In Caught, Westwell combines choreography and musical performance to create sonically layered ethereal environments in which the body moves through emotional states to the point of catharsis. In March 2025, Magnus Westwell opened WEIGHT, a duo show with British painter Marcus Nelson, which exhibited Westwell’s short films And Then Gone and Cycles (III) at Number 1 Main Road, Berlin.