Meow Meow is the performance name of Melissa Madden Gray, a cabaret, lounge and vocal jazz artist from Canberra, Australia. She works in musical theatre and performance art, and is known for a style that combines cabaret with theatrical and experimental elements.

Career and performance work

Meow Meow builds her reputation through solo shows and large-scale performance pieces presented in theatres, concert halls and arts festivals internationally. Her work includes seasons at the Sydney Opera House, where she presents Beyond Glamour and Meow to the World: Crisis is Born. She also works on VAMP!, a full-length original music theatre piece commissioned by Malthouse Theatre with composer Iain Grandage.

Another ongoing work is Insert the name of the Person You Love, a piece about the time it takes to fall in love, developed with scientists and psychologists from Rutgers, Stonybrook and Oregon State Universities. This work is curated by Sydney Festival and Performance Space 122 in New York.

International appearances and collaborations

She performs at venues including Joe’s Pub in New York, the Highline Ballroom and Hiro Ballroom in New York, SF MoMA, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Sydney Opera House, the American Repertory Theatre, the Boston Orpheum, the Glamour Room in Shanghai and Darcelle XV. She also appears at arts festivals such as Time Based Arts in the US, Ann Arbor, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Brisbane, Darwin, Queensland Music Festival, New Zealand, Braga in Portugal and Festival Estuaire in France.

Meow Meow collaborates with John Cameron Mitchell, Rodney Fisher, John Jesurun, Lance Horne, Anthony Coleman and Iain Grandage. She tours the US with Amanda Palmer and the Dresden Dolls, and works with Thomas M. Lauderdale of Pink Martini on the album Here Kitty Kitty…The Lost Sessions. She is also a regular guest in the Olivier Award-winning La Clique on the West End and performs with the Weimar NY collective alongside Justin Bond, Penny Arcade, Taylor Mac and Julie Atlas Muz.

Recognition and projects

She receives Australian Green Room Awards and the New York Franklin Furnace Performance Art Award. Her solo programme is curated by David Bowie for the NY High Line Festival, and by Pina Bausch for the dance-theatre festival 08.

Her concerts for the Carnegie Hall “Berlin in Lights” series at Neue Galerie New York sell out, and she has extended seasons at Bar jeder Vernunft in Berlin. She also records for WDR, RBB, ABC, Radio France and Sonic Arts.