Starter Pack is our new, fee-based program for artists and curators to develop a project or a skill with a mentor outside of an institutional framework.
Starter Pack is designed to connect highly-skilled, mid-career practitioners to offer their knowledge to emerging artists and curators in a friendly and personalised setting. As the costs for arts education increase, while artist employment within institutions remains precarious, we would like to facilitate this space for reciprocal learning, adjacent to other formal and informal training and development programs in our local arts ecology.
The first Starter Pack will take place between January - April 2025, with Leyla Stevens (artist), Lara Chamas (artist), Nikki Lam (artist-curator) and Bianca Winataputri (curator).
Starter Pack Summer 2025
Afifah Tasya Amaliah
Building her role in cultural programming, Tasya draws from her background in film practice and her involvement in a cross-cultural filmmaking collective. From Makassar, Indonesia and now based in Naarm/Melbourne, she is particularly interested in facilitating new ways of seeing and creating across cultural boundaries. Her approach emphasizes examining positionality beyond content and form, considering it within the collaborative processes and cultural frameworks through which creative works take shape.
Aida Azin
Aida Azin is a painter, art facilitator, and community organiser whose art practice emphasises the importance of connection with community and culture. Reflecting on her experiences as a 'third culture kid' of Filipino-Iranian heritage born in Australia, she explores the intersections of identity, heritage, and place through her work.
Alice McCool
Alice McCool is an emerging curator, writer and creative producer based in Tarntanya. As an intercountry adoptee, her research critically engages with ideas around nationhood, race, culture, and diaspora. She has previously held leadership roles at Nexus Arts and FELTspace, and currently co-facilitates fine print magazine and works as a creative producer for Open Space Contemporary Arts. In 2024, Alice was selected as a participant of Creative Australia’s (re)situate Biennale Delegates program.
Bonnie Huang
Bonnie is an artist playing and creating with textures, desires, and dreams. They highlight the overlooked quotidian moments and shared languages of intimacy that seep, pervade, and linger in our lives. Reflecting on shared memory and popular culture, Bonnie is interested in investigating the construction of self-identity and communities of belonging to present a more sacred perspective to view the queer community and its ways of belonging. Specifically, looking to develop a language of queer religiosity and spirituality through queer abstraction, materiality, and assemblage. Their work speaks to the politicisation of our bodies and public spaces but offers a sense of hope towards the possibility for connection beyond individualistic boundaries.
Gillian Kayrooz
Gillian Kayrooz lives and works; between Gadigal and Dharug lands in Sydney and Western Sydney. In 2018 she was awarded the Create NSW Young Creative Leaders Fellowship which led her to undertake residencies and exhibit internationally in the Asia-Pacific region. Kayrooz held a studio artist tenancy at the Parramatta Artist Studios from 2020-2021. She is currently participating in 'Counterflows', a program commissioned by Artshouse (Melbourne) and UTP (Sydney), that enabled her to participate in the ‘March Meeting’ program as part of the 2023 Sharjah Biennale in the UAE. In 2024 she was announced as the recipient of the Create NSW x Artspace Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship.
Makeda Duong
Makeda Duong is a visual artist living on Kaurna land. She has exhibited in local and interstate galleries including the Jamfactory, Craft + Design Canberra, and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Her piece ‘Personal Responsibility’ is currently touring nationally as part of the Tamworth Textiles Triennial. Her work has been acquired by the Adelaide Migration Museum, and she was the winner of the 2022 Gallery M Contemporary Art Prize. Her current practice attempts to unravel and represent aspects of her lived experience in relation to themes such as race, class, and mental illness.
Ming Zhu Hii
Ming-Zhu Hii (she/her) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores observation, sense-perception and memory through poetic cinematic forms - fragmentation, repetition, and dream intelligence. Thematically, her work explores identity, trauma, belonging, and systems of power, corruption and survival. With roots in theatre making and performance, her practice has evolved to inhabit the intersection of narrative film and fine art. Based in Naarm/Melbourne, she brings two decades of film, television, audio and performing arts industry experience to her expanded cinematic work.
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Reina Takeuchi
Reina Takeuchi is a Japanese Australian artist-researcher and dance maker interested in cross-cultural exchange. Heavily informed by contemporary and street dance, Body Weather and House dance culture, Reina’s work utilises choreographic processes and the transitory qualities of sound and action to meditate on human existence and the ethereal experiences of her peripatetic upbringing across East and Southeast Asia. Her projects have been included at Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, SomoS Arts, Berlin, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Performance Space and Sydney Dance Company. She is a PhD candidate at QUT, focusing on Asian Australian performance for her research project Countermoves of the Transcultural.
Ronen Jafari
Ronen Jafari AKA Mynamechef (Mynamechef069 on fortnite) likes to cook with his friends. My practice is socially informed (still learning) and homie-driven. Currently I’ve been developing my culinary skills and exploring the social, political and individual power of food (recent works feature twin towers of fairy bread standing 9 – 11 inches tall respectively).
Supina Bytol
Supina Bytol is an Australian artist of Cocos Island Malay heritage whose practice explores migration, colonialism, and cultural resilience. Working from her home studio in Naarm (Melbourne), she creates performance-based films, prints, and compositions in a DIY fashion, using accessible resources. Bytol blends archival photographs, mythology, and contemporary themes, reflecting the post-colonial experiences of her people. Her work integrates Eastern and Western healing practices. A former performer, she has exhibited for, Asia- Topa, + The Islamic Museum of Australia, and currently facilitates creative workshops in community spaces.