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Join us for a professional development and leadership symposium alongside our current exhibition Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism. Hear leading women from the arts, media, politics and community and public life speak about their careers and and the route that led them there, including the detours and inspiration. Speakers include, Dr Andrea Carson (chair), writer and lecturer in Political Science at The University of Melbourne; Kylie Belling, Yorta Yorta, Wiradjuri, South Sea Islander woman, actor, director, educator; Professor Cordelia Fine, writer and academic psychologist; Elizabeth Gower, artist, academic and curator at Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne , with more speakers to be announced shortly.
This symposium aims to share cross-institutional and intergenerational wisdom, reflect on past experiences and generate greater knowledge about developing a career across the arts, the humanities and politics more broadly today.
Getting Down to Business is presented in association with the Trawalla Foundation, the Office for Prevention and Women’s Equality, and the University of Melbourne.
SPEAKER BIOS
Dr Andrea Carson (chair) is a lecturer of Political Science at The University of Melbourne. She is an Honorary Fellow at the University’s Centre for Advancing Journalism and teaches women the skills to become politicians as part of the School of Government’s Pathways to Politics program. Her research interests include newspapers and their business models; journalism studies; media ownership and regulation; media effects and political agenda setting; investigative journalism; digital newsrooms; political communication; elections and election reporting.
Kylie Belling is a Yorta Yorta, Wiradjuri, South Sea Islander woman born and bred on Wurundjeri country in Melbourne. Belling has over twenty years of experience working across the Aboriginal community controlled, not-for-profit and government sectors as a leader and manager across the arts, education, justice and health and human services portfolios. Belling was the first Aboriginal graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts (Class of 1985, School of Drama), and went on to forge a successful acting career across theatre, film and television. Cultivating a strong belief that the creative arts can positively change the world, she was a co-founder of Australia’s longest running Aboriginal theatre group, Ilbijerri Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Theatre Cooperative Ltd. With a strong academic background including research and specialisation in Aboriginal public health and wellbeing policy, she has integrated an educational and artistic focus towards Aboriginal strategy and program design and delivery needs. Belling is committed to following her passion for working with Victorian Aboriginal communities to improve the current and future outcomes of Australia’s First Nation Peoples.
Professor Cordelia Fine is an academic psychologist and writer. She currently lectures in The History & Philosophy of Science at The University of Melbourne. Fine is the recipient of the inaugural Women’s Leadership Institute Australia Research Fellowship (2016–17). She has been awarded a number of accolades for her publications including her most recent book, Testosterone Rex (2017), which won the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize and was named an Amazon Best Book of the Year. Fine’s 2010 book Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference was short-listed for the 2013 Warwick Prize, 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, 2011 Best Book of Ideas Prize and the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her other publications include A Mind of It’s Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives (2005) and the introduction for the Britannica Guide to the Brain (2008). Fine is a regular contributor to media publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Monthly and New Statesman.
Elizabeth Gower is a distinguished artist and academic, based in Melbourne. Gower has held over 35 solo exhibitions in Australia, USA, UK, Europe and the UAE since 1976. Her interest lies in the human desire to create order from the chaotic. Gower creates stunning abstract compositions from humble materials with an emphasis on translucency, fragility and impermanence. Her practice draws much of its content and form from the world of the everyday, such as commercial images and objects, as well as, familiar and domestic materials such as newspaper and tissue paper. Gower is an exhibiting artist in Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism at the ACCA (2017–18) and a Senior Lecturer and ART150 Research Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne. In 2017 she curated 9 X 5 NOW as part of ART150 at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne.
