Nicole Brimmer is an emerging artist and writer with a background in visual art and communication design. She is interested in the hybridization and juxtaposition of literary and art genres. She recently published her first pieces of writing on rhizomes.net an independent academic journal in America and on ABC open. Her work is a reflection of everyday life in the city and industrially designed environments in contrast to processes from the natural world. She loves juxtaposing an recontextualizing these elements to question consumerist tendencies. Nicole is also a current volunteer at ACCA.
Andy Butler is a writer, curator and artist. His writing has been published widely, including in Overland, Art+Australia, Vault and Runway. In 2017 he undertook the BLINDSIDE emerging curator mentorship with Emily Cormack, and was a participant in the Emerging Cultural Leaders Program at Footscray Community Art Centre. In 2018 Butler participated in the Writer’s Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program, which included a two-part residency regional Victoria, and in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He has performed his writing nationally and internationally, including at Emerging Writer’s Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival and the Jakarta Writer’s Series.
Fayen d’Evie is an artist, writer, and curator. Her projects are often conversational and collaborative, and resist spectatorship by activating diverse audiences in embodied readings of artworks. Fayen advocates the radical potential for blindness, arguing that blindness agitates ocularcentric norms. With artist Katie West, she co-founded the Museum Incognita, and she is also the founder of 3-ply, which investigates artist-led publishing as an experimental site for the creation, dispersal, translation, and archiving of texts. d’Evie is currently a candidate for a PhD in Curatorial Practice at Monash University. Born in Malaysia, and raised in Aotearoa/New Zealand, she now lives in the Ironbark bushlands of Dja Dja Wurrung country, Australia. As part of the program Fayen will be collaborating with Jessica Lehmann and Eva Balog.
Anna Farago is a Melbourne visual artist and teacher. Recent exhibitions include Materiality 2017, Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn; No Woman is and Island 2017, Blindside, Melbourne; A Crafted History: People and Place 2016, ArtSpace, Realm, Maroondah; and a solo show Stitching Place 2016, Montsalvat, Melbourne. Farago was a finalist in the Nillumbik Prize (2018, 2016), the Mary & Lou Senini Textile Art Award (2017) and Artist-in-Residence at Darebin Parklands, Alphington (2015/16). She has been exhibiting since 2003 and has work in private and public collections nationally and internationally. She is currently a MA Research candidate at Federation University, Ballarat.
Monique Grbec is a Wiradjuri writer. A child of the stolen generations, she is interested in the generational effects of institutionalisation, and the White Australia Policy. Her lifework is fundamentally text based and addressed through the lens of Indigenous Standpoint Theory. In 2017, she was the winner of the Lord Mayor’s Life Writing Award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders for The Secret Darkness. She has also written reviews and essays for A+a Online, IndigenousX and Meanjin. She is a currently part of the New Review Program and in 2017 she took part in Yirramboi’s Blak Critics program.
Maria Griffin is a visual artist and writer. She was a founding member of First Floor artists and writers space in the 1990s where she frequently wrote essays to accompany artists’ work. She has published reviews, poetry and creative non-fiction across various outlets in Australia and in the US. She has recently undertaken short courses with the Victorian Writers Centre (Ekphrasis with Bella Li) and the Node Curatorial Studies Online (Creative Forms of Art Criticism and Art Criticism).
Loni Jeffs is a writer and editor based in Melbourne. She is a co-founder and editor at Lor Journal. She has previously worked with organisations across Melbourne including KINGS Artist-Run, George Paton Gallery, Un Projects and RMIT’s non/fictionLab.
Kiara Lindsay is a poet living in Melbourne. She completed her Honours in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne in 2017. Kiara is the founder and co-editor of ekphrastic literary journal, Inhabit. Her work has previously appeared in Visible Ink, Voiceworks and Lor Journal. In 2018, she was the recipient of the H.B. Higgins Poetry Scholarship from the University of Melbourne.
Chloe Martin is a writer and performer. She writes scripts, journals, critique of contemporary performance, instructions for improvisation performance, and comedic fiction. Her most recent projects include co-writer and actor for the tv series Deebrief; and performer for How to turn a ship around (They could say love) by Sam George and Lisa Radford at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne. In 2016, Martin created and performed Horizon for Yona Friedman with Cie.Silex at the Belgium Triennale. She also created an Ode to Andrea Fraser for Stillpoint Berlin; and has performed in London, Edinburgh and Paris as one half of the mask duo Les Soeurs Souche. Martin is trained in mime and clown at the Lecoq school in Paris and took part in the Laboratory of Movement Studies to study sculpture and slapstick. She is a current Master candidate at Deakin University and a current volunteer at ACCA.
Nancy Mauro-Flude is a post-Internet artist and performer who specialises in artisanal networks and visceral systems. She is interested in the demystification of technology, and the ‘mystification’ that lies in and through the performance of the machinic assemblage. Gray magics, hijackings, driftings and seizures of power are many of the sensitive and subversive subterfuges by which she urges, twist and explores the aesthetic politic of the open source spirit. Mauro-Flude has published, devised and curated extensively within the field of experimental art. Founder of Despoina’s Critical Media Coven and leads the Post Digital Culture Studio at School of Design, RMIT. She is represented by Bett Gallery, Tasmania.
Chantelle Mitchell is a writer and researcher whose practice explores experimental non-fiction, and non-fiction poetry. She has worked on numerous exhibition texts and publications. This year, with editor Justin Wolfers of The Lifted Brow, she produced the fragmented curatorial text Harbouring Refusal engaging with legacies of mining, sediment, labour and art. She is a member of the Performance Document Working Group, led by Anita Spooner, which most recently culminated in a global collaborative google document, realised in Melbourne at ACMI, as part of Channels Festival.
Ainslee Meredith is a writer, paper conservator, and PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her current writing practice brings together her interests in archival conservation, critical theory and psychoanalysis, and has published articles on these topics in The Lifted Brow and un Magazine in 2018. Meredith’s poetry has been published in The Best Australian Poems 2013, Scum, Southerly, Going Down Swinging, Mascara Literary Review, and Voiceworks. My chapbook, Pinetorch, was published as part of the Express Media/Australian Poetry New Voices Series in 2013 and was shortlisted for the FAW Anne Elder Award in the same year. She has also given readings, lectures and interviews at various locations including Gilgamesh Salon, the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, the National Young Writers’ Festival, The Wheeler Centre, The University of Melbourne, and on the radio programs Art Smitten on SYN FM and Final Draft on 2SER.
Megan Payne is a dancer, choreographer and writer of creative critique, nonfiction and poetry. Their writing has appeared in Archer Magazine and This container zine. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts (2013), they danced with Russell Dumas’ Dance Exchange at Larret Cultural-Centre, France); The Body Festival, Christchurch; for Reorienting the Post Colonial Symposium at Institute of PostColonial Studies, Melbourne and for Dance Remains at Monash University Museum of Art. Payne has presented co-authored work in a range of contexts including the Melbourne Fringe Festival, TCB Art Inc, TBP-HQ, Bus Projects, TO DO/TO MAKE at 215 Albion Street, Brunswick. Payne has worked with artists including Shelley Lasica, Alice Heyward, Ellen Davies, Ivey Wawn, Leah Landau, Chloe Chignell, Shian Law, Rebecca Jensen and Sarah Aitkin. Payne is studying Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT.
Amaara Raheem is a Sri Lankan-born Australian choreographer, performer, and writer. Her practice interrogates processes of embodiment located in architectural contexts and her work takes multiple forms including performance, video installation, sound/song and text. She has presented works in partnership with various Australian organisations including Dancehouse, Melbourne; Footscray Community Arts Centre, Melbourne; MPavilion, Melbourne; Critical Path, Sydney; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; as well as at The Performance Arcade, Wellington; Four Dimension Spatial, Macau; Colombo Dance Platform, Sri Lanka; Access Gallery, Vancouver; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver;. Ovalhouse London; and Chisenhale Dance Space, London. Her writing has been published in Performance Research Journals including On Generosity (forthcoming) and Performing Writing, Routledge, 2018, Global Performance Studies Online Journal (GPS), Performing Mobilities (ed. Mick Douglas), and LOGBOOK published by Access Gallery, Vancouver. Raheem is a current PhD candidate at the School of Architecture & Urban Design, RMIT University.
Raphael Solarsh is a writer, editor and reviewer with a creative practice that focuses on the intersection between narrative, lived experience and information technology. His arts reviews have been published in The Guardian and Writers Bloc, and in 2015, he self-published Outliers: Stories of Searching, a book of short works. In 2017, Solarsh wrote and built an enhanced and multimedia ebook (EAME) in ePub format, which demonstrated how reader-guided interactivity, non-text (image and sound) narrative and text narrative could be combined into a single, seamless creative non-fiction narrative as part of his Masters of Writing and Publishing at RMIT. In conjunction with the EAME, he developed a creative practice model specifically for this style of narrative based on Possible Worlds Theory (PWT). PWT grew out of hypertext fiction, an early attempt at interactive, reader-driven storytelling.
