Hi, I'm Matt.

By day I do internal communications at a financial services company. Evenings and weekends belong to improv - teaching, performing, and producing, mostly with The Improv Conspiracy here in Melbourne.

My path in wasn't a straight line. I started an Arts/Law degree, hated the Law part, and dropped out to work as a teacher's aide. I picked up stand-up the year after, moved to Melbourne to study Film & TV (dropped out again - sensing a theme), ran an open mic in the basement of a Hawthorn shisha bar, performed in Japan, and did my first solo hour in 2017. Then I found improv in earnest, and with it some of my closest friends. We toured a sketch show to Perth Fringeworld, I started teaching in 2019, and I finally finished a degree - a BA in Creative Writing - in 2021. I've been part of every Melbourne International Comedy Festival since 2013 in one form or another: writing, performing, directing, or producing.

Somewhere along the way I started bringing improv principles into the corporate world, and corporate thinking back into improv. The two feed each other more than you'd think.

Why I teach

Education is the through-line of my life. I spent seven years as a teaching assistant for children with high and additional needs. My mum is a school principal - she was even my teacher for two years of primary school. Whether I'm on the receiving end or doing the teaching, it's the thing I keep coming back to.

What I love is the synthesis: pulling ideas from wildly different places and finding the one that finally unlocks understanding for a person. Watching someone change across a single session - go from stuck to free - brings me more joy and pride than I know how to describe.

How I think about it

I take improv more seriously than most - not in a stern way, but because I think it's worth learning and thinking deeply about. I pull from everywhere: sports and evolutionary psychology, the study of ritual and myth in cultural anthropology, whatever's useful. Improv is the prism I see the world through, and I push most of what I learn back through that lens.

For performers, my number one job is your psychological safety - making you feel connected to the room and safe enough to take big swings. The more big swings you take, the more home runs you hit. My job is to make you feel safe enough to miss.

For teams, the same instinct applies - and there's a decade of research behind why improv works for adults at work. There's more on that here.