Celia Craig, BA Hons (York) LRAM, ARAM

Creative Arts Fellow 2024 at National Library of Australia, Excellence in Classical Award winner at Australian Women in Music Awards 2023, Celia promotes the wider public awareness of neurodivergent experience through classical music with a special emphasis on South Australia’s creative women, landscape and history. Her goal is to create musical experiences of colourful harmony for audiences of all ages and demographics, promoting the relevance of classical music in achieving a flow state.

Arts South Australia Biennial Artist 2024-2026, Celia was formerly Chairman of BBC Symphony Orchestra and Principal Oboe, Adelaide Symphony 2011-2018. Elected an Associate of Royal Academy of Music in 1997, now resident in Australia’s only UNESCO City of Music Adelaide, she regularly returns to London to teach at RAM.

Trained by world-leading musicians including Leonard Bernstein, Bela de Csillery (pupil of Kodaly), Vladimir Ashkenazy; Scholar at the specialist music school which trained Jacob Collier, Patron King Charles; Celia was destined for a career in music. 

Growing up with a developmental or innate synesthesia, known as chromesthesia; Celia has seen colour in harmony since age three.

Synesthesia is a “perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory/cognitive pathway… People with developmental synesthesia are “neurodivergent.” (Cleveland Clinic).

Following an elite orchestral career touring to five continents, recording at Abbey Road, dedicatee of Master of the Kings Music Judith Weir’s Oboe Concerto; since the pandemic Celia has toured Australia improvising with electric guitarist Caspar Hawksley as Colours of Home for Musica Viva in Schools, building wider awareness of neurodiversity among primary school children. 

As her first Biennial Artist project, she and Caspar have each invited an acclaimed musician to extend their musical collaboration, by including trumpeter Harrison Smith and cellist Thomas Marlin, to form Arc en Ciel (literally, Rainbow).

Celia founded the globally distributed, chromesthesia-inspired record label Artaria in 2017. In 2024 Celia undertook executive coaching training through Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s ‘Ignite’ program. An Arts South Australia Fellow 2020, she also graduated as a Business SA Encore Entrepreneur in 2022. She is in demand as a coach, including National Music Camp 2025. Her synesthesia-inspired Spotify playlist is linked here.

Celia produces her own chamber concerts in exquisite venues and bespoke concerts to order for private commissioners, using a network of elite local musicians.