Online Course: Art and Agency

Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and author, whose books include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and most recently, Design as an Attitude. Her weekly design column for The New York Times was syndicated worldwide for over a decade. Born in Manchester and based in London, Alice is chair of the board of trustees of Chisenhale Gallery and a founding member of the Writers for Liberty campaign for human rights. She is a co-founder with Paola Antonelli of Design Emergency, a research platform that investigates design’s role in building a better future. Alice has been awarded an OBE for services to the design and the arts.

Amanda Hayman is a Brisbane-based independent curator, writer and entrepreneur. She grew up in Logan city and has cultural connections to Kalkadoon and Wakka Wakka Country in Queensland. Amanda has a Bachelor of Arts, with a contemporary art major, from Griffith University. She is the Owner/Director of Blaklash Creative, a creative agency and consultancy specialising in Aboriginal art and design; Aboriginal Art Co, a not-for-profit organisation focused on the promotion of Aboriginal art; and Magpie Goose, a fashion label that produces wearable art on clothing.

André Lepecki is full professor and Chairperson at the Department of Performance Studies, New York University and editor of numerous anthologies in dance and performance theory. He is the author of Exhausting Dance (2006, translated in 12 languages) and Singularities (2016).

Dr Angela Hesson is Curator of Australian Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts to 1980 at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). She has curated numerous exhibitions across international and Australian art including Love: Art of Emotion 1400-1800 (2017), Hans and Nora Heysen: Two Generations of Australian Art (2019) and She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism (2021). Prior to her appointment at the NGV, she was employed as a lecturer in Art History and Literature at The University of Melbourne, as a curator at The Johnston Collection, and as a freelance arts writer.

Astrid Lorange is a writer, editor, teacher and artist who lives and works on unceded Wangal country. She lectures in theory at the University of New South Wales. With Andrew Brooks, she is one-half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. She co-edits Rosa Press and the Infrastructural Inequalities journal. Labour and Other Poems was published by Cordite Books in 2020 and Homework (co-written with Andrew Brooks) is forthcoming with Discipline in 2021.

Ben Quilty is a visual artist living and working in the Southern Highlands, New South Wales, Australia. Widely known for his thick, gestural oil paintings, Quilty has worked across a range of media including drawing, photography, sculpture and installation. His works often serve as a reflection of social and political events; from the current global refugee crisis to the complex social history of our country, he is constantly critiquing notions of identity, patriotism and belonging. Quilty’s work has been exhibited in a number of significant national and international exhibitions including most recently Panorama, TarraWarra Museum of Art (2016); Painting. More Painting, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) (2016); When Silence Falls, Art Gallery of NSW (2016); Charles, Insitu, Kurfurstenstrasse, Berlin (2016); Mad Love, Arndt Art Agency (A3), Berlin (2017) NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) (2017); Quilty, Art Gallery of South Australia, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Art Gallery of NSW (2019).

Cathy Leahy is Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) where she has curated numerous exhibitions including William Blake (2014); John Wolseley – Heartlands and Headwaters (2015); Luminous: Australian Watercolours 1900–2000 (2016); Colony: Australia 1770–1861 / Frontier Wars (2018) and most recently the NGV blockbuster exhibition Escher x nendo: Between Two Worlds (2018).

Damon Young is a prize-winning philosopher and writer. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including On Getting Off, The Art of Reading, How to Think About Exercise, Philosophy in the Garden, and Distraction. His works have been translated into eleven languages, and he has also written poetry, short fiction, and children’s fiction. Young is an Associate in Philosophy at The University of Melbourne.

Diamond Stingily is an American artist and poet who addresses the materiality and mythology of identity and social class. Her artistic practice encompasses video, sculpture, and writing, and draws relations between the intimacy of one’s own biography and perceptions of history. Instead of working on representation of black communities in general, she examines childhood memories, which, fragmentarily, speak of the systemic racism and violence inscribed into US-American culture. Stingily has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including CCA Wattis, San Francisco; ICA Miami; and Kunstverein München, Munich. She also participated in the 2018 New Museum Triennial. Stingily’s work is represented in private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; ICA Miami; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

Emily Potter is Associate Head of School (Research) in the school of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University. Her research examines the role of cultural representations in the production of the western idea of ‘nature’, and the impacts of visual and literary texts on how we understand and inhabit our environments. She is particularly interested in this question in relation to colonised Australian environments. Emily is the author of Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field of Settler Colonial Place.

Emma-Kate Wilson is a Sydney-based contemporary art and design writer. Her writing examines current trends in global art, interior design and architecture, focusing on the cultural impact of art and design. After moving to Australia in 2013 from the UK, Emma-Kate has immersed herself in the visual language of the country – specialising in designers’ and artists’ pursuit of a sustainable creative practice. Her writing has appeared in art publications like Ocula, Art Almanac, Artist Profile, and design magazines such as Design Anthology, Inside, and Est Living.

Formafantasma (founded by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin) is a research-based design studio investigating the ecological, historical, political and social forces shaping the discipline of design today. Whether designing for a client or developing self – initiated projects, the studio applies the same rigorous attention to context, processes and details. Formafantasma’s analytical nature translates in meticulous visual outcomes, products and strategies.

Dr Frances Borzello is an art historian, feminist art critic and author. Her books include The Naked Nude; At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art; A World of Our Own: Women as Artists; and Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self Portraits.

Geoff Hogg is currently an Adjunct Professor in the School of Art at RMIT University. Hogg trained as a painter and was an early contributor to the revival of contemporary Public Art. This work grew from a concern to reconnect with undervalued sources and traditions in contemporary cultural life. He has led over 70 large-scale art in public space projects in Australia and overseas. He also led the Master of Arts – Art in Public Space program and was Founding Director of CAST – the Centre for Art, Society and Transformation at RMIT University.

Hannah Presley is Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Hannah works closely with artists to respectfully represent the cultural connections that inform their work. Hannah was the inaugural Yalingwa curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), where she curated A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness (2018), and was First Nations Assistant Curator for Tracey Moffatt at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

Hoda Afshar is an Iranian-born visual artist living and working in Melbourne. She also lectures in photography and fine art. Hoda’s work has been widely exhibited locally and internationally and published online and in print. Her work is also part of numerous private and public collections. Through her work, she explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making. Working across photography and moving-image, she considers the representation of gender, marginality, and displacement. Recent exhibitions include PHOTO 2021 Festival of Photography, Melbourne (2021), Between the Sun and the Moon: Lahore Biennale (2020), Remain, University of Queensland Museum of Art, Brisbane (2019), Beyond Place, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, USA (2019), Primavera 2018, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. In 2015, she received the National Photographic Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery and in 2018 won Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Australia.

John J. Curley is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University, where he teaches classes on modern and contemporary art history, as well as photographic history. He has published widely on American and European post-war art and photography, with essays in journals and catalogues for major museum exhibitions. He is the author of A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War (2013). His second book, Global Art and the Cold War was published in 2019.

Josephine Meckseper is a visual artist born in Lilienthal, Germany, who lives and works in New York City. Her large-scale installations and films have been exhibited in numerous international biennials and museum shows worldwide, including solo exhibitions at: Frac des Pays de la Loire (2019), MOSTYN Contemporary Art Gallery, Wales (2018); Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany (2014); The Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (2013); Kunsthalle Münster, Germany (2009); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2009); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008). Her works are in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Kalia Brooks Nelson PhD is a New York–based curator, consultant, educator and writer. She is Co-editor of and contributor to Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (2019) and has written for Artforum; May You Live in Interesting Times (Venice Biennale Catalogue, 2019); Histórias Afro-Atlanticas: Anthology, Volume 2; Art South Africa Magazine; Exposure: The Journal for the Society of Photographic Education; and The Light Work Annual. She is currently an Adjunct Professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University. Brooks Nelson holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She received her MA in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts in 2006, and was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program 2007/8.

Katharina Prugger is Acting Curator, Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). She holds a Master of Art Curatorship from The University of Melbourne and has over ten years of experience working in the field of contemporary art. Prior to joining the NGV in the lead­up to the inaugural NGV Triennial in 2017, she worked at galleries in Berlin, Munich, London and Melbourne. During her time at the NGV she has been part of the curatorial teams for a number of exhibitions including NGV Triennial 2020 and We Change The World (2021).

Laura Raicovich is a New York-based writer and curator who is completing a new book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (2021). She recently served as Interim Director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art; was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center; and was awarded the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic. While Director of the Queens Museum from 2015 to 2018, Raicovich co-curated Mel Chin: All Over the Place (2018), a multi-borough survey of the artist’s work. She lectures internationally and in 2019-20 co-curated a seminar series titled Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, from which she is co-editing an anthology of writings on the subject. She also is the author of At the Lightning Field (2017) and co-editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (2017).

Leah Santilli is an Outreach Educator at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). She is involved in the planning and delivery of learning programs for students and adults across many NGV exhibitions including the NGV Triennial 2020, the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Japanese Modernism, as well as areas of the permanent collection. Leah is also involved with School Support Programs at NGV, facilitating Outreach visits to schools across metropolitan Melbourne.

Maggie Finch is Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Since joining the NGV, Maggie has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including: Darren Sylvester: Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something (2019); Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition (2017), Transmission: Legacies of the Television Age (2015), Sue Ford (2014) and Endless Present: Robert Rooney and Conceptual Art (2010). She was a contributing curator for Melbourne Now (2013), and the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ touring exhibition The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-1937 (2011).  She has also worked on several children’s exhibitions, including Robin Rhode’s The Call of Walls (2013) and Jon Campbell’s sing what you feel (2012).

Dr Maria Quirk is Assistant Curator, Collections and Research at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). A historian of women’s and art history, she has previously held academic positions at the University of Queensland and Deakin University, and is a former State Library of Queensland research fellow. Maria’s research has previously appeared in Woman’s Art Journal and The Journal of Victorian Culture and Visual Culture in Britain. Her first monograph, Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England: The Hustle and the Scramble was published by Bloomsbury in 2019.

Marla Katz is a J.D. Candidate, 2022 at the University of Connecticut School of Law. She completed her M.A. in 2019 and her B.A. in 2018 both at St. John’s University. Marla is also the Editor-in-Chief of Volume 54 of the Connecticut Law Review. She served as President of the Arts, Entertainment, and Sports Law Society at the University of Connecticut School of Law, and she worked as a Legal Intern for the Center for Art Law in New York.

Meg Slater is Assistant Curator, International Exhibition Projects at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Since 2017, Meg has worked on a number of the NGV’s major international exhibitions, including MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art (2018); Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor (2019); Keith Haring / Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines (2019-20); French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021) and Queer (2021-22). Prior to her role at NGV, Meg completed internships in the Curatorial, Exhibitions Management and Public Programs departments of several museums including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In 2016, Meg graduated from the University of Queensland with a Dual Degree in Art History and Business. Meg is currently undertaking a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne.

Megan Patty is Head of Publications, Photographic Services and Library at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). In addition to her role at the NGV, Megan Patty is the founding curator of the Melbourne Art Book Fair. She has edited numerous publications, including Some Posters from the NGV (2017); NGV Triennial (2017); The Centre: On Art and Urbanism in China (2019); and She Persists: Perspectives on Women in Art & Design (2020). Her curatorial projects span publishing and graphic design and include the major exhibitions Experimental Jetset: Super Structure (2018) and Metahaven: Field Report (2020). For the past thirteen years she has worked across the museum and arts sector to develop new publishing propositions for museums, artists, and private and public collections. She is a PhD candidate at RMIT University in the School of Architecture and Urban Design.

Myf Doughty is a designer and curator with a decade of experience working across design production and curation. She holds a Bachelor of Design from the University of New South Wales and a Master of Teaching from Deakin University. As Acting Curator, Contemporary Design and Architecture at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Myf has contributed to exhibitions and publications of Australian and international artists and designers including NGV Triennial 2017 and 2020, and has been responsible for the coordination and delivery of Melbourne Design Week since its inaugural year in 2017. She is a PhD candidate at Monash University Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.

Myles Russell-Cook is Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Myles’s passion is for First Nations contemporary art. He has published extensively on art, design and fashion, and curated a number of exhibitions at the NGV. Myles derives much personal and professional influence and inspiration from his maternal Aboriginal heritage in Western Victoria with connections into Tasmania and the Bass Strait Islands.

Myriam Ben Salah is a curator and writer. She has been coordinating special projects and cultural programming at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, since 2009. She is the editor-in-chief of Kaleidoscope magazine’s international edition.

Naomi Extra is a freelance writer, poet and doctoral candidate in American Studies at Rutgers University – Newark. In both her creative and scholarly work she explores the themes of agency and pleasure in the lives of black women and girls. Extra has been awarded fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, Crescendo Literary, the African American Intellectual History Society and Imagining America. Her essays have appeared in Zora, Glamour, Lit Hub, Broadly, Shondaland and on other platforms. Her poems have been published in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic, Bone Bouquet and The Rumpus. She is the winner of the 2019 BOAAT Chapbook Prize.

Nathan ‘Mudyi’ Sentance is a Wiradjuri librarian and museum educator who grew up on Darkinjung Country on the New South Wales Central Coast in Australia. He writes about critical librarianship and museology from a First Nations perspective.

Neil Morris (DRMNGNOW) is an independent artist based in Naarm/Birraranga. His sound and approach, grounded in strong cultural values, fuses a striking interdisciplinary approach to his art as an MC, Instrumentalist and poet with a searing decolonial and culturally engrossing message. He has developed a reputation as one of the most important rising artists in the land with his live show known to transfix audiences.

Dr Petra Kayser is Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Petra has curated and co­curated numerous exhibitions including The Satirical Eye: Comedy and Critique from Hogarth to Daumier (2009), The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster in Early Modern Europe (2012) and Jim Dine: A Life in Print (2017). She has a special interest in Old Master drawings, and in the social and cultural history of prints and their production, iconography and reception.

Richard Mosse is an Irish-born, New York-based a photographer whose technique and style merges photojournalism with creative expression to capture the beauty and tragedy of war and destruction around the world. His complex and charged subject matter has included refugee camps, war-torn countries, abandoned plane wrecks in the farthest reaches of the planet and the former palaces of Uday and Saddam Hussein. Mosse’s iconic and visceral 52-minute video artwork, Incoming, 2014-2016, co-commissioned by the Barbican and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), documents mass migration and displacement of people from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe. For this body of work, Mosse used an advanced, military-grade surveillance camera that is able to detect human heat from a distance of 30 kilometers. Through the camera’s lens, subjects are dehumanized, depicted as a mere biological trace, as the series reveals the harsh struggle for survival lived daily by millions, seen but overlooked, and ignored by many. These stills portray harrowing and emotional scenes, such as a pyramid of bodies transported on a truck, life jackets piled as people arrive to a shore and a fire ablaze in a refugee camp.

Roanna Gonsalves is the award-winning author of the book The Permanent Resident (2016), published in India as Sunita De Souza Goes to Sydney. Her four-part radio series On the Tip of a Billion Tongues, commissioned and broadcast by ABC Radio National, is a portrayal of contemporary India through its multilingual writers. She has a PhD from University of New South Wales, Sydney and has been facilitating and teaching creative writing workshops for all ages within communities, for literary festivals, at schools and in the university sector for many years.

Dr Rosemary Roberts studied at Beijing University and worked for several years in the publishing industry in China before gaining a PhD in Chinese Literature from the Australian National University (ANU). She is currently an Honorary Research Senior Fellow in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on cross-disciplinary work combining elements of Chinese cultural studies, gender studies and literary studies. She has published extensively on Chinese women’s literature, gender in the Model Revolutionary Works of Cultural Revolution China and more generally on Chinese socialist literature, art, and culture. She is author of Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) (2010) and has co-edited five volumes of critical works on cultural and women’s studies in China and East Asia including The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics”: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture (2017).

Santilla Chingaipe is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker whose work explores migration, cultural identities and politics. Chingaipe is a regular contributor to The Saturday Paper, and serves as a member of the Federal Government’s Advisory Group on Australia-Africa Relations. Her first book of non-fiction detailing the untold stories of African convicts, is forthcoming, and a documentary based on the book, Our African Roots, airs in 2021 on SBS.

Shonae Hobson is a Southern Kaantju woman from Coen, Cape York Peninsula. She currently works as Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Hobson was the inaugural First Nations Curator at Bendigo Art Gallery where she curated Piinpi: Contemporary Indigenous Fashion (2020-21), Australia’s first major survey of contemporary Indigenous Australian fashion to be undertaken both nationally and internationally. Hobson works collaboratively with communities and artists to foster and build capacity for economic and social independence.

Steven Rhall is a Taungurong artist, describing himself as a post-conceptual artist operating from a First Nation, white-passing, cis-male positionality. His interdisciplinary practice responds to the intersectionality of First Nation art practice and the Western art canon. Rhall is interested in interrogating modes of representation, classification and hierarchy through formats including installation, performance, sculpture, curatorial practice and public/private interventions. He exhibits internationally, lectures at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) at The University of Melbourne and is a PhD candidate at Monash University on Birrarung-ga land (Melbourne, Australia).

Tanya Ha is an award-winning Australian environmental advocate, best-selling author and science journalist. She is currently Director of Engagement at Science in Public, Vice President of Science and Technology Australia, and a member of Science Gallery Melbourne’s Leonardo Group. She is also a director of Diversity Council Australia and Westernport Water. Tanya is a former reporter for ABC TV’s Catalyst. Her books include Greeniology 2020 and Green Stuff for Kids.

Dr Ted Gott is Senior Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). He has curated and co-curated more than 25 exhibitions, including Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire and Napoleon: Revolution to Empire. He has published widely on Australian, British and French art, and in 2013 co-authored a cultural history of the gorilla in nineteenth and twentieth century art, literature, scientific discourse and cinema (Gorilla, Reaktion Press, London).

Dr Vincent Alessi is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts and Art History at La Trobe University. His research interests include the life and work of Vincent van Gogh, mid-late nineteenth century European art and popular graphic illustration and Australian contemporary visual art. Vincent is also a curator, working locally and internationally

Wayne Crothers is Senior Curator, Asian Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). He spent a total of eighteen years living in Japan, including two years at Kyoto Seika University researching traditional Japanese art practices, completed a two-year Master of Fine Art Degree at Tama Art University in Tokyo, and lectured for six years at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Recent exhibitions include Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality (2019), Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape (2019) and Japanese Modernism (2020).