Tim read English at Trinity College Cambridge, then studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich.  

 

As a singer and actor he performed for English Touring Opera, Opera 80, English National Opera, Opera North, the Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne, and the Chichester Festival.

 

He has directed participatory projects for most of the leading opera companies and orchestras, including the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Opera North, Glyndebourne as well as the London Symphony, London Philharmonic and Philharmonia orchestras.

 

He devised and led the outreach work of English Touring Opera for 16 years, for whom he wrote the libretti for and directed many operas for young people, including Laika the Spacedog (winner Best Production, Armel Opera Festival, Hungary), In the Belly of the Horse, Shackleton’s Cat, Borka, Different and This Is My Bed, working with composers Russell Hepplewhite, Rachel Leach, Llywelyn ap Myrddin and Pete Letanka, and designers Jude and Alan Munden, Ruth Paton, Babis Alexiadis and Catherine Ryan. With Woo Music (Clive and Mark Ives) he made Waxwings, one of many such operas for audiences with autistic spectrum disorders, which is revived in 2019. Also for ETO he directed Fantastic Mr Fox, by Tobias Picker and Donald Sturrock.

 

For many years he has collaborated with Turtle Key Arts, delivering projects for people living with dementia (Turtle Song)  and young people with ASD (Turtle Opera - originally at the Royal Opera and most recently at the V&A in 2025). He led Share Music residential projects for disabled adults for many years, and was a founder member (along with Stephen Langridge, Daryl Runswick and Mary King) of Green Light Music Theatre. He works regularly with young people with SEND, for whom he has written a large number of songs. He leads the weekly Saplings sessions for HMDT Music, and works every year in this context with students from the Royal Academy of Music.

 

He has devised and written, together with composer Rachel Leach, a number of large-scale community operas, including One Day, Two Dawns in Cornwall (winner 2011 Royal Philharmonic Society Award), Under the Hammerbeam Roof for the 500th anniversary of Hampton Court, One Breath in Sheffield and Doncaster, and Zeppelin Dreams for the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre. With Helen Chadwick and Kate Pearson, he created A House on the Moon for the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre. All these pieces featured mixed casts of over 200 performers. 

 

With young people he has devised a large number of operas such as Bessie's Wings and Edenbridge (Lambeth), Sand Surf Snow, Sem'ye, Rhinopera (Camden), and The Almondsbury Bells (Gloucestershire). For the MFY Proms at the Royal Albert Hall he wrote the words for and directed 800 Miles as the Albatross Flies (composer Russell Hepplewhite), performed 500 young people. He directed Forever Young  for W11 Opera in 2019, and also for W11 wrote the lyrics for It's Your Move in 2021. For the last six years he has devised new work for the Primary Shakespeare Company (with composer Rachel Leach) working with children in London boroughs, based on plays including Macbeth, Julius Caesar and in 2025 Hamlet.

 

For the Casa da Musica in Porto he has devised many ambitious new pieces, including Border Control, Icarus, Spirit Level, Curado, Gulag, and in 2018 Montanha, working with composer Jorge Prendas and designer Cristiana Felgueiras. Each of these productions featured large mixed ability casts of professional and non-professional musicians, actors and dancers. In 2022 he wrote and devised a new piece for Porto called Love, working with composer Jorge Queijo and designer Patricia Costa. In 2024 he was invited to create a new piece to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution. Abril was performed exactly a year after the revolution by a large mixed cast of soldiers active in 1974, dancers (from Balleteatro), and 25 talented musicians. 

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2022 saw the premiere of Under the Little Red Moon, an animated film for ETO, for very young children. A live production of the piece toured the UK in 2023/24, and had residencies at Polka Theatre as well as ROH. Laika the Spacedog received its Swiss premiere at Nouvel Opera Fribourg in 2019, and was revived by ETO in the same year. A new production by Forum Neue Kunst  premiered in Oldenburg, Germany, in August 2022. In Summer 2023 Ignite Music revived Borka, in a new production directed by Susan Moore, and travelled to literary festivals across the UK. In June 2026 a new production of Laika the Spacedog premieres at Magdeburg Opera.

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He was appointed MBE in the 2019 New Year’s Honours.