British Barbadian opera singer Peter Brathwaite FRSA, a graduate of the Royal College of Music, London, works across different art forms to uncover and amplify the stories of suppressed voices. He begins his residency at Queen’s during an opera season in which he performs roles in the New Opera Days Festival in Czechia, The Time of Our Singing at La Monnaie de Munt, Brussels, and in Mark Anthony-Turnage’s new opera Festen at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden, London.
In addition to performing on major international opera stages, he creates his own theatrical productions. Insurrection, a collaboration with the Royal Ballet and Opera, had its first public work-in-progress performances in spring 2023, and Effigies of Wickedness was commissioned by English National Opera/Gate Theatre in 2018. He has been shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award, and his collaborative work on Wolf Witch Giant Fairy (Royal Opera/Little Bulb) won a Laurence Olivier Award.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he created his pioneering Rediscovering Black Portraiture series, which reimagines depictions of Black subjects using domestic material culture. The National Portrait Gallery, Toledo Museum of Art, King’s College London/Wellcome Trust, the Bristol Museum, Kensington Palace, and the Barbados Museum and Historical Society have all exhibited Brathwaite’s photographic series.
As a broadcaster for BBC Radio 3, he has authored and presented programmes on Black portraiture and the cultural legacy of enslavement in Barbados. He has written for The Guardian and The Independent, and he is a prominent speaker on performance, identity, and restorative justice in the arts. Getty Publications published his book, Rediscovering Black Portraiture, in spring 2023. He is currently writing a family history of Barbados, which Chatto & Windus (Penguin Random House) will publish in 2026/7.
Since October 2023, he has been a visiting artist with the Humanities Cultural Programme at Oxford, supported by the Bodleian Libraries, where he curated Mischief in the Archives, an exhibit exploring his ancestors’ connections to the Codrington plantations in Barbados. Newcastle University, his alma mater, awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Music (DMus) degree in July 2023. Brathwaite is also a member of the Church of England’s Contested Heritage Committee.