Regs

Picture Skew contributor bios in alphabetical order

Laura Castagnini is a Melbourne based curator and writer. She has written a number of catalogue essays and articles about contemporary art and was recently awarded the NAVA Curator Mentorship Initiative (with Vikki McInnes) to develop a curatorial project about humour and feminist art to be held at Margaret Lawrence Gallery in 2013. Past curated exhibitions include “Re/Gendered” (Platform Artist Group Inc., 2010), a group exhibition and performance event exploring gender fluidity. She is currently the Curatorial Assistant at Anna Pappas Gallery.

Rachel Feery is a video-based artist and curator dabbling in hybrid art projects, performance and video installation. She is the founder of Short Play, a DVD publication of Australian video artworks and critical essays. She curated the first release, Volume 00:01 on the topic of ‘Play’. She also selects works for On the Screen, an ongoing exhibition program at dianne tanzer gallery + projects. Notable exhibitions include: Cardboard Utopia in association with Australian Centre for the Moving Image, with Lisa Stewart; Dream of Pictures, a dual video and sound projection at Blindside, Melbourne; Sunset Over Cardboard Mountains, an experiential art project, which was part of the 2010 Next Wave Festival and created with co-collaborators, Ed Gould and Lisa Stewart; and Echoes of Gold, a collaboration with Lisa Stewart at Firstdraft in Sydney.

William Head is a filmmaker, cross-platform director & curator from Melbourne. A graduate of Documentary Directing at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), his film, Night Fare, received the 2010 Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) award for Best Tertiary Documentary and received a nomination for Best Multimedia. He was a finalist in the 2010 F4 Festival for emerging Australian filmmakers at the Australian International Documentary Conference. A recipient of both the Margaret Lawrence Social Justice Fund Award and the Anthony Ganim Postgraduate Award, he was also the winner of the 2009 VCA award for Most Innovative Production (non-fiction). His film Buiten, a re-animated Super 8 film about a year spent in Amsterdam, was a runner up in the Lonely Planet World Wide Encounters Film Festival. In 2010 he received a Raw Nerve grant to make an experimental documentary We Are Illuminated.An alumni of the Crossover Labs, his cross-platform work includes directing projects for The City of Greater Dandenong and is a founding curatorial producer of the short non-fiction Mubi Garage channel and screening program Don’t You Have Docs? His film work can be explored at www.notrealfiction.com

Ariele Hoffman is a Melbourne-based independent curator and writer. She writes for publications from Art Monthly to Arts Info and has contributed photographs to Broadsheet Online Directory. Currently she is undertaking an MA by Research in History at the University of Melbourne and working as an assistant curator at the Jewish Museum of Australia. She is also on the curatorial committee at Top Shelf Gallery, and is a co-founder of Sweetness and Light Arts Project, ‘Facilitating Socially Inclusive Curatorial-focused Projects’ nationally, with Matthew Perkins, Course Co-ordinator, Department of Fine Art, Monash Art Design & Architecture. The first manifestation of Sweetness and Light is Material Matters: Substance. It is about to open at Top Shelf Gallery and she would love to see you there… otherwise you can go visit them in Tasmania where their next exhibition will take place in July!

Mike Jones is a Melbourne-based musician, photographer, art historian, researcher, archivist and film buff (not necessarily in that order).

Alex Kakafikas is a political activist and writer interested in the politics of culture and the culture of politics and is involved in local Melbourne campaigns supporting and educating about the anti-austerity movements in Greece.

Natalie Kon-yu is a Melbourne based academic and writer, who finds herself outraged on a weekly basis. She is the inventor of phrases such as ‘dick-flick’ (action-based films) and ‘cock-drop’ (when a man’s name is inserted into a conversation to give the woman legitimacy – ie, when anyone mentions Bill Clinton in discussions about Hillary, or when anyone mentions Kasey Chambers’ husband, ever). She would one day like her bio to state that she divides her time between New York and Seville, but concedes this may be a few years down the track.

Jean Lizza, formerly of Perth, studied film and writing twice at a university level, as she enjoys tormenting herself in an academic context. Now Melbourne-based, Jean worked for several years at a centrally located arthouse cinema and was responsible for some of the first screenings of The Room, considered one of the worst films ever made. Jean manages three bands under the guise Mother Hubbard and has mixed feelings of both joy and resentment at their successes. To offset these negative feelings, she is currently working on a screenplay, web series and stand-up material and is putting together the program for an outdoor cinema that is opening in 2012.

Stephen Palmer is an artist and writer based in Melbourne. He has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions, and is a co-facilitator of Light Projects ARI.