Artists

amira.h. is a queer Lebanese Muslim performance artist, currently living in Naarm/Melbourne, who works extensively in the areas of endurance and body art. Her practice has employed ritual performance, object-making and installation, and most recently, performing to audiences via online platforms (Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Periscope). Themes of transgression and failure are explored in her work, as well as the binaries of joy and sorrow, celebration and mourning, and the spaces in between. The unconventional form of her work serves to not only push the limits of her own body and faith, but also tests the level to which her audience is prepared to watch and endure with her. amira.h. completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons 1) at the South Australian School of Art (UniSA) in 2008. She has exhibited in a range of gallery spaces and artist-run initiatives including Into My Arms at ACE Open (Adelaide); Tough Love at the AEAF (Adelaide); HOLY at Firstdraft Gallery (Sydney); The One at Artroom5 (Henley Beach); Three Rituals at Project Space, CACSA (Adelaide); and Performance Review Unit at FELTspace (Adelaide).

Born from Cebu City, Philippines, Roman Berry migrated with his family to Ceduna, South Australia, where he discovered his love for community theatre and the arts. He trained at Flinders University Drama Centre (Acting) and Centre for Performing Arts (Dance). Performance career highlights include playing the role of Ernie, in Jordan Shea’s Malacanang/ Montgomery (Part of the Cybec Electric 2023 program for Melbourne Theatre Company); Cameron Mackintosh’s Australian Premiere of Miss Saigon; Harry Miller’s Pageant: The Musical. He was the Artistic Director II Commonwealth Youth Games Opening & Closing Ceremony (Australia) and created/ currently facilitator & conceptualised Body and Mind, Wellness Workshops since 2016 (The Voice of Domestic Workers UK). He is also the current resident facilitator at The Couch International Centre (Melbourne) for a series of Theatre Workshops.

He recently returned to Melbourne, after ten years in London, where he collaborated as Director/Movement Director on several Off West End and Fringe Theatre productions, focusing on New Plays & New Musicals. These were with companies such as Get Over It Productions, The Bread & Roses Theatre, Goldsmiths University, The Hope Theatre, The Jack Studio Theatre, Arrows & Traps Theatre Company, just to name a few. He was also an Artistic Associate and later promoted as Marketing and Production Manager at The Bread & Roses Theatre, London.

He directed Lorna Wells’ sold-out season of It Tastes Like Home, The Musical (London). Whilst back in Melbourne, he directed Jamila Main’s Butterfly Kicks for 2019 Queer Quickies Festival at Theatreworks (Melbourne); Creative Advisor for Narre Warren South P12 College’s 2019 production of Hairspray the Musical; workshopped a development reading of DTC’s Illegals The Game Show at Multicultural Arts Victoria. Directed Electric Dreams, the Musical by Drew Lane, produced by Music Theatre Melbourne. He produced Before Breakfast an Opera (Dan Graham – Director), which featured Australian Opera Soprano Jane Ede at the 2022 Sydney Fringe and was the Production Administrator for Kwento’s 2022, One Hour No Oil by Jordan Shea (Kenneth Moraleda – Director) at KXT Bakehouse Theatre (Sydney).

He is the Artistic Director for Divergent Theatre Collective, which champions new work and is currently co-producing with Flight Path Theatre (Sydney), Teenage Dick by Mike Lew (Dan Graham – Director).

Max Brading is an artist working on Kaurna Land specializing in interactive and real time visual arts, immersive media and artistic integration with multimedia systems. With a diverse range of skills including photography, digital design, music and sonic art, large format projection of visual works, and lighting design, Max’s experience allows them to connect and create using technology across disciplines.

http://badmax.tv

Fleur Green is a musician and creator with many strings – literal and otherwise – to her artistic bow.

In her early life and career, Fleur was a prodigious, classically trained multi-instrumentalist, playing piano, violin, and a range of percussion instruments – ultimately to award-winning, orchestral standards.

From these beginnings, Fleur moved towards her passions, reinventing herself as a composer, singer, and songwriter. She wrote and performed an acclaimed debut album When the tide rushes in with her band Fleur Green and the Keepers, performing and touring the album before taking time to give form to a long-standing vision – a musical, set in, and reflecting her experience of, her lifetime home of South Australia.

The Desert Plea – the raw story of Alice is a musical of 14 songs, distilled from more than 100 songs Fleur wrote over three years, inspired by themes close to her heart. The Desert Plea tells the story of Alice – a young woman who finds escape through creativity within the SA desert landscape and its unique flora and fauna, exploring themes of mental health, the climate crisis, and dreams of dusty deserts and salty seas. The grand narrative was carefully and considerately constructed in bush ballad form by writer, David James Chapple.  

Fleur was determined to give the musical its first life, and brought together a talented musical line-up to record the work. With a grant from Arts SA, and featuring musicians Django Rowe, Tom Kneebone, Kyrie Anderson, Dylan Kuerschner, along with Fleur, and with narration by Rory Walker, strings by Zephyr Quartet and multi-instrumental arrangements performed by Fleur, The Desert Plea was recorded at WizardTone studios with Jarrad Payne and James Brown.

Fleur now wishes to bring this truly South Australian musical into its ultimate form – to see it produced and performed on stage, for audiences local and beyond.

Annabel Matheson is a queer performer, maker, and arts worker based on Kaurna land. She completed her acting training at Flinders University Drama Centre, graduating with First Class Honours and a University Medal (2014), and has a Master of Arts and Cultural Management from the University of South Australia (2022).

Onstage credits for State Theatre Company South Australia: The Bleeding Tree (Theatre Republic), Terrestrial, Machu Picchu (Sydney Theatre Company), and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. More on stage credits include: Grug and Grug and the Rainbow (Windmill Theatre); Bluey’s Big Play Australian National Tour (AKA Productions); Angelique (isthisyours?); and; Eurydice (Foul Play Theatre).  Annabel has also worked on the development of new works with a raft of companies and independent artists.

With her collaborator Eliza Oliver, she is co-founder of Ladylike Theatre Collective – a queer-feminist theatre company creating works across Adelaide and Sydney. Ladylike projects have been supported by ATYP, Belvoir, Flinders University, and more, and in 2019 Ladylike were State Theatre Company SA Residents. She has worked as a tutor, director, and facilitator for young people and adults for over ten years, was a part of the first group of RUMPUS Theatre members, and is currently the Associate Artist for Queer Programs at ActNow Theatre.

Kirsty Martinsen is a painter, designer and performer and filmmaker based in Adelaide, South Australia. She has a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the South Australian School of Art and a Diploma of Painting from the NY Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.

Her lived experience with MS continues to provide her with new insights into and an outlook on her work, included in her approach is the use of a power-wheelchair as an extension of her thinking and practice. Kirsty is a believer in art as an agent for social change and in a disability arts and culture that enables disabled people to strive for artistic expression, champion their own destiny and combat prejudice.

Predominately working in painting and drawing, her powerful pastels boldly convey the strength of quiet observation and trust in her intuitive process. Kirsty considers herself a colourist though admits that’s mainly due to her interest in nature’s inherent beauty, and each relationship to grey.

In a world of fast decisions, literalness, the need to know and be told how to think and feel, Kirsty is interested in the opposite. She’s interested in the quiet, slow surrendering of a need to know or be told, and the layers and textures of our relationship with ourselves. She loves to work from life, either with people or plein air, working outside amongst the trees, birds and sunshine, drawing.

Kirsty has exhibited in Australia, US, UK and Amsterdam. Her short film, Breathe, won the Mercedes Matter/Ambassador Middendorf Award at X Marks The Spot: Women of The NY Studio School, the 2018 Alumni show. In 2016 she participated in the Australia Council’s Sync Leadership Program; sat on Arts SA’s Richard Llewellyn Art and Disability Trust panel; performed in the 2016 Fringe in Spring written by Patricia Cornelius and Directed by Maude Davey with No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, and in Jérôme Bel’s GALA in the 2017 Adelaide Festival.

In 2018 she was commissioned by SBS and SA Film Corporation to make a short documentary called Limited Surrender, available here.

She is currently working with dancer Erin Fowler on a collaboration for The Mill’s Showcase called ‘Bodiness: call and response’.

Dan Thorpe is… a pianist and performer with a special interest in queer work, and work with a focus on the theatrical and performative. He trained classically through his teens, before injury gave him an out from playing dead white men. The work he performs now celebrates his broken and queer body, rather than further battering it into a ninteenth century mould. He has been described as having “no respect for the culture of pianism” [Audience Feedback, 2019],  as well as “one of Adelaide’s most exciting young performers” [The Thousands].  He has performed in some pretty cool places, like Spectrum (NY), Praça Das Artes (Brazil), The Center for New Music (SF), the Red Rattler (NSW), Oakland Freedom Jazz, a raft on Elizabeth Quay (WA), and the lobby of Portuguese luxury hotel Estalagem da Ponta do Sol (I bled all over their piano, which they were weirdly fine with?). His work as a performer has been documented by Laundry, ABC New Waves Podcast ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]), Making Waves/Making Conversations. He was awarded Best Emerging Artist by the Adelaide Critics’ Circle in 2016 in acknowledgment of his work as a performer and composer. He also performs in Stereo//Mono with Melanie Walters, primarily on electronics.

… a composer whose work “decimates the boundaries of genre” [Cut Common]. The work he is most proud is the pieces he’s made in collaborations across disciplines and artforms; like 2015’s personwwhowatchestoomuchtelevision — in collaboration with poet Rhys Nixon and the contemporary dancers of Concrete Collective, or 2016’s front pockets, back pockets, jacket pockets — the 2016 Soundstream ECF winning song cycle using the poems of Stacey Teague. That’s not all he enjoys making, though; he’s also particularly proud of From Above (commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra), false cognate (commissioned by the APRA AMCOS Art Music Fund, and performed dozens of times around the world), and untitled (limp wrist) (for Decibel + an untrained mover). Dan’s work has been performed around Australia and the world, by musicians like the Australian String Quartet, Ensemble Offspring, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, unassisted fold, Conrad Tao, and Kupka’s Piano. His work has been presented as part of highSCORE Festival, Æpex Ensemble’s Soundsystem Takeover, and Freshminds Festival. In the latter, his Debussy Remixes (2015) were finalists for best mixed media work; he has also been honoured as a finalist in the SA Music Awards for his release Homecoming (Three Years Later), as the recipient of Best Emerging Artist award by the Adelaide Critics’ Circle in 2016 in acknowledgment of his work as a performer and composer, and named South Australia’s Young Achiever of the Year in Arts and Fashion in 2018. He sometimes writes on commission, but prefers to work collaboratively with performers. He holds a Bachelor of Music (Composition)  from the University of Adelaide, with honours and a Master of Philosophy in Sonic Arts from the same institution. He was a 2018 Carclew Fellow, and has received project and commission funding from APRA AMCOS, Carclew, and The Helpmann Academy.

… a noisy queer with thoughts an opinions (but not in a Morrissey way, it’s ok). He has written for The Lifted Brow ([1], [2]), and presented research at Electroacoustic Winds Conference (Aveiro, PT), Totally Huge New Music Conference (WA), ACMC, TENOR (co-author), as well as student-run congresses and presentations. He has facilitated workshops about listening and field recording for young people at Carclew, developed, taught an industry-readiness curriculum at the University of Adelaide (2014-2017), and worked as an ITAS Tutor (2013-2015). He is on the scientific committee for TENOR 2019.

​… a working class queer who works in hospitality. Be kind if he forgets to email you, he’s probably making, like, a dozen espresso martinis or something. He lives, writes, and exists primarily on Kaurna Land, and acknowledges the never-ceded sovereignty of elders past, present and emerging. Australia always was, and always will be aboriginal land.

Mary Angley (she/they) is an award-winning theatremaker and a recent graduate from the Victorian College of the Arts’ Master of Directing program. A child of The Internet, in her work she reveres the unique properties of both live and digital performance. Her practice spans writing, directing, dramaturgy, and performance, with sporadic forays into design. She received First Class Honours from Flinders University for her practice-led research project: an immersive adaptation of Timon of Athens.  For her Masters Showcase, she developed a new work, Hedda GablerGablerGabler, exploring how game-play can be used to disrupt gender biases in the theatrical canon. After graduating, she created Paper Mouth Theatre as a forum for bringing together emerging creatives to work on experimental projects within a Queer, Feminist framework.

Working on Kaurna Yerta, she has directed, dramaturged, and designed The Triumph of Man at RUMPUS and Autoeulogy at The Mill. She has performed her critically acclaimed solo show Grief Lightning: A Satire in 78 Slides at Fokus Creatives, The Bakehouse Theatre, House of Spaghetti, Gasworks Theatre, and RUMPUS. Most recently, she acted in the role of “Samuel’s Mother” in her new play, YOU’RE ALL INVITED TO MY SON SAMUEL’S FOURTH BIRTHDAY PARTY (or SAMUEL). This work was selected for The Mill’s Centre Stage Residency and received the Melbourne Fringe’s Tour Ready Award. Both SAMUEL and Grief Lightning will hit the road in the Spring.