Molly Cob

Molly Collier-O’Boyle, also known as Molly Cob, is a human from Meanjin/Brisbane who is currently living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. She spends most of her time plucking, picking and sawing away on the viola, cursing all the while. When not screaming profanities at wooden boxes, she attempts to balance her life as a performer, collaborator, curator and educator.

Molly is a violin graduate of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music and the University of Queensland. Soon after these degrees, she ditched the fiddle and picked up the middle fiddle (viola) at the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM). Whilst at ANAM she completed a Master of Music Research through Griffith University, exploring curatorial processes centered around collaboration in the creation and development of new works for the viola.

During this time, she became an emerging artist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, an academist with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Australian World Orchestra, a fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, Principal Viola of the AYO, and artist in residence with duo partner Liam Wooding at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada. 

Post formal study, she was launched into freelance life and pivoted between the role of Acting Assistant Principal Viola with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) and middle fiddle player in the Rathdowne Quartet, and was a finalist in the Freedman Classical Fellowship. She then danced between the roles of Acting Associate Principal Viola with the MSO, viola tutor at AYO’s National Music Camp, Guest Principal Viola with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Guest Associate Principal with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Guest Principal Viola with Victorian Opera, and as contract viola with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra. 

Molly’s recent highlights reel includes premiering her project Elva - a song cycle for viola and voice in collaboration with Momentum Ensemble, co-founding new harp, flute and viola trio Violets, co-founding and developing new ensemble ÆON with colleagues in Melbourne, and performing as a guest artist at the 2023 Port Fairy Spring Music Festival, 

Outside of her time thinking about wiggly air, she enjoys spending time swimming, drawing, taking her kitten Fizzy for walks, laughing, digging herself into existential spirals, and sharing a frothy or two with family and friends.

Molly acknowledges the land of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, on which she lives and works. Sovereignty was never ceded.