Tanya Riches is a lecturer at Hillsong College, Sydney, and a researcher at the Centre for Disability Studies, an affiliate of The University of Sydney. She is an Australian songwriter and singer, whose first song was published by Hillsong Music Australia when she was fifteen years old. She has conducted three Hillsong choirs at two campuses (the City adult and youth choirs, and Hills youth choir), and administrated Hillsong’s United band for six years, during which time it achieved gold album status. Her MPhil thesis, entitled “Shout to the Lord: Music and change at Hillsong: 1996-2007,” charted the theological, musicological, and business change over ten years. She has published various articles on Hillsong Church, and to date, the only ABC Religion & Ethics opinion piece addressing this topic. She currently attends Hillsong Alexandria campus in Sydney. Tom Wagner is an ethnomusicologist based in London. His PhD thesis, entitled “Hearing the ‘Hillsong Sound’: Music, Branding and Transcendence in the Religious Experience Economy,” is based on three years of participant observation conducted at Hillsong Church London from 2011-2014. To date, he has produced five scholarly articles on the movement and collaborated with The New York Times on two articles regarding the church. He has co-edited two previous volumes on congregational music and media.
