Matthew Tomkinson (b. 1989) is a writer, composer, and researcher based in Vancouver.

He recently completed a two-year SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in CENES at the University of British Columbia, where he developed a book project titled Adapting Schreber: From Memoir to Multimedia and Beyond (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2027). The book assembles an archive of multimedia adaptations based on Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903).

He holds a PhD from UBC Theatre Studies, specializing in sound and disability arts. His first monograph, Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), examines auditory representations of mental health differences. His academic articles have appeared, or are forthcoming, with Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury Publishing, Anthem Press, The Soundtrack, Sonic Scope, and Sounding Out.

Working across text, performance, installation, and sound, his artistic practice centres around formalist experimentation, constraint-based composition, and the resonances between disability aesthetics, mad poetics, and perceptual anomalies.

His debut audiovisual album as Mathoms, The Woe Trumpets (Decaying Spheres), is accompanied by a film presented at Sound Scene Festival (Washington, D.C.) and Chapeltown Picture House (Manchester, U.K.). Together with Andy Zuliani, he also produces collaborative sound works under the name Magazinist.

His compositions for dance, theatre, and film have been presented widely at venues and festivals including CBC Gem, the Vancouver International Film Festival, Festival du nouveau cinéma de Montréal, the PuSh Festival, Film at Lincoln Center (New York), VALÈIFF (Madrid), and TANZAHOi (Hamburg), among many others. Recent collaborators and commissions include Ballet BC, Company 605, Raven Spirit Dance, Theatre Replacement, Théâtre la Seizième, Eric Cheung, Evann Siebens, and the All Bodies Dance Project.

He is the author of oems (Guernica Editions, 2022), Paroxysms (Paper View Books, 2022), For a Long Time (Frog Hollow Press, 2019), and Archaic Torso of Gumby (Gordon Hill Press, 2020, with Geoffrey D. Morrison). His shorter writings have appeared in Literary Hub, Minor Literature[s], Full Stop, Exacting Clam, The Ex-Puritan, and elsewhere.

Matthew lives on the ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.