Contemporary & Experimental Performance

Panel Chair & Deputy Chair

Anna Nalpantidis (Panel Chair)

Anna Nalpantidis is an award-winning creative producer, curator and director working across contemporary performance, film and public art. With a particular interest in site-responsive work, she has engaged audiences in chemical laboratory buildings, bathtubs in bookstores, community halls in regional towns, disused warehouses, shipping containers, band rooms, cinemas, shopping malls, bathrooms, libraries, quarries, phones, screens, theatres and galleries.

Anna has worked in senior roles for organisations including APHIDS, Next Wave, Experimenta and Melbourne Fringe and with presenting and venue partners including RISING, The Substation, Performance Space, WinterWild Festival, ACMI, National Gallery of Victoria, ACCA, State Library of Victoria, Arts Centre Melbourne, Now Or Never, MONA FOMA, Melbourne Fringe, Platform Arts, Arts House, Noosa Regional Gallery, Horizon Festival, Fusebox Festival, PS21 and Transform Festival.

Varsha Ramesh (Deputy Panel Chair)

Varsha Ramesh is a creative producer living and working between Chennai, India and Narrm/Melbourne, Australia.

Informed by a background in dance, her work focuses on experimental and contemporary practice. She holds a Master of Arts and Cultural Management from Univiersity of Melbourne, and has worked at Arts House, Runway Journal, Now or Never, RISING, and Sangam.

Panellists

Aamer Ahmed

Aamer is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, curator and DJ.

Aamer’s practice is informed by their QPOC identity, perpetually connected to their sense of community and championing platforms for under-represented and underestimated voices. Their work in contemporary arts has already elevated events for the likes of Dark Mofo, Melbourne Music Week, Barba, Midsumma Festival and the Neighbourhood Festival, co-presented by Footscray Community Arts and The Substation.

Aamer continues their practice as the Theatre & Live Performance Producer at Footscray Community Arts with fearless wonder and determination. Creating experiences crafted with deftness and curation driven by considered, spatial storytelling.

Aviva Endean

Aviva Endean is a clarinettist, composer, and performance-maker dedicated to connecting people with each other and their environment through attentive listening. Her creative practice opens up possibilities for collaborations, transcending the traditional in favour of a dynamic artistry which embraces the unfamiliar. Whilst deeply steeped in music, her vision extends beyond her primary artform to expand ways in which sound can be experienced and understood, and to discover new forms of expression that reflect the here and now.

Aviva has developed a profile as a significant force in Australian contemporary music. Her solo music has been released on Room40 (Lawrence English) and SOFA music (Norway), with solo and collaborative shows presented by major festivals including Huddersfield Festival (UK), Music Meeting (NL), Sound of Stockholm (SE), DarkMOFO, MONA FOMA (TAS), and The Substation (Melbourne), as well as appearing as soloist with Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras. She has worked in close collaboration with organisations including Chunky Move, Australian Art Orchestra, Chamber Made, and Liquid Architecture and is an ongoing member of Hand to Earth, The Cloud Maker, and Driftwood.

Marcus McKenzie

Marcus is an artist based in Naarm, originally from Lutruwita. His performances use the relationship between audience and performer as a site for strange sensory encounters – folding in schisms of language, parafictional wor(l)d-building, meme-adjacent media and questionable dancing. Operating at the intersection of experimental club performance & puppet theatre for kids aged 8-12, his works take place in theatres, old supermarkets, dingy nightclubs and churches.

His works have been presented at The Substation, Carriageworks, Arts Centre Melbourne, Art Gallery of NSW, RISING, Soft Centre, Dark Mofo, MONA, and in more intimate contexts including Gertrude Glasshouse, Schoolhouse Studios, Miscellania, Kings ARI and Blindside. Marcus also collaborate widely as a performer and dramaturg on major projects in Australia and internationally.

Emma McManus

Emma McManus is a theatre-maker, musician, director and current peer for the Australia Council for the Arts. A founding member of performance collective Applespiel, she has performed at Next Wave, Sydney Festival, Performance Space, Malthouse Theatre and You Are Here. In 2018 she was an intern with queer feminist theatre collective The Rabble and presented Never Trust A Creative City with Maria White at Arts House for the Festival of Live Art (FoLA) and for Ainslie and Gorman Arts Centres, supported by Arts ACT and Arts House’s Culture Lab.

In 2019 this toured to Griffin Theatre’s Batch Festival and the Performance Studies International Conference in Calgary, Canada.

Her new work ‘The Waves‘ is a sibling collaboration and explores gravitational-wave theory, queer theory and the biography of Virginia Woolf.

Emma is also part of the 2019 Ahead of the Game residency, a project supported by Ainslie and Gorman in partnership with AIDS Action Council and A Gender Agenda.

Priya Namana

Priya Namana is an artist and an arts manager living and working on the unceded lands of the people of the Kulin Nations in Naarm. Migrating to so-called Australia from the sub-continent of India, Priya investigates porous notions of borders, stillness and in-visibility, at the intersection of text, sound, movement and installation in a contemporary art context.

With an anti-disciplinary approach, she endeavours to translate and articulate her post-studio-based inquiries and practice-led thinking in the embodiment of the various contexts within which she is present.

Kate Sulan

Kate Sulan is a performance maker, dramaturge and facilitator, specialising in collaboratively devised performance. Kate was the founding Artistic Director of Rawcus, an award-winning ensemble of performers with diverse minds, bodies and imaginations and led the company for 22 years (2000-2022). Kate is also a long-term collaborator with Back to Back. She has worked with the company as a co-devisor, dramaturge and director. Kate was one of the team of artists working on the multiyear Refuge project at Arts House. Refuge explored the role of artists and cultural institutions in times of climate catastrophe.

In 2018, Kate completed an Advanced Diploma in Group Facilitation ( Groupwork Centre) and mediation training ( The Resolution Institute). She helps facilitate complex and challenging conversations with care and creativity.

Kate’s practice is relational and collaborative. Her work embraces complexity and diversity and is underpinned by the desire to amplify connection, fuel dreams, accumulate questions, slow down time, invite reflection, challenge what is possible and celebrate humanity.

Jason Maling

Jason Maling is an artist working across live performance, social practice, and experimental public art. For more than 25 years, he has devised projects that transform how we gather, play, and make meaning together. His practice centers on the art of the welcome and the choreography of agency—inviting people, sites, objects, and whole communities into open-ended systems where new forms of relation can emerge.

Recent works range from underground cosmologies (Diagrammatica, RISING 2025) and sound system summits (Heavy Congress, RISING 2022) to flea markets of backstories (Single Channel Video, with Back-to-Back Theatre, RISING 2022) and long-form community rituals (The Keeper, Sunshine Coast, 2018–2025).

Maling is the founder of Strange Engine and a founding member of Field Theory, the award-winning public art collective. He holds an MFA from the Slade School and a PhD from Deakin University.

Tamara Saulwick

Tamara Saulwick is an acclaimed performance-maker, director and dramaturg creating work across and between artforms for theatres, galleries and public spaces. Her works have toured extensively, been adapted for radio, and have been honoured by numerous industry awards.

Since 2017 Tamara has been the Artistic Director of Chamber Made, a Melbourne based company renowned for creating trailblazing works at the intersection of performance, sound and music. In her role at Chamber Made Tamara continues to conceive and direct new works, collaborate with and support lead artists from outside the company, curate artist and artform development programs, and mentor emerging artists.

Emily Parsons-Lord

On the land of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, award-winning artist Emily Parsons-Lord makes visually stunning, embodied installations and performances. They elicit wonder and provoke critical re-examination of some of our most fundamental materials: air and explosions. These materials of the climate crisis speak to both the invisibility and the spectacle of collapse, and the confluence of personal and environmental catastrophe.

Air is simultaneously local and global, encompassing the effects of breathing as well as the governance of polluters and policy-makers. Air is where what we jettison into seeming oblivion is caught and returned. It is a physical site, as well as a place to project our imaginations. An explosion is an extreme condition of air, a rapid state of transformation from one state to another. By shifting our experience of time to a geological timescale, the rapidity of change since the industrial revolution makes it clear that we are exploding. This is how it feels to explode. Through air and explosions Emily’s work interrogates the experience of witnessing this expanded unstable moment of multiple simultaneous catastrophes. It shifts in register and scale from the sublime to the relatable, humorous and queer.