Meet the selection panel
Applications are assessed by a panel of twelve artists, curators, academics and arts professionals.
Bronek Kózka
Bronek Kózka is an artist, academic and curator working between Melbourne and Shanghai. He lectures in photomedia at RMIT University's School of Art, is a visiting scholar at the Gengdan Institute of Beijing University of Technology, and is co-founder of Culture Focus and founder of Down the Lane Studios in Collingwood. His work has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery London, the Arsenale di Venezia and the Museum of Photography Seoul, among others. Residencies have shaped much of his own practice, and he believes they give artists what is hardest to find at home: time, space and distance from routine. Down the Lane is his way of offering that to another artist.
Qingyi Cai
Qingyi Cai is a Shanghai-based independent curator working across contemporary photography and historical visual culture. At the Shanghai Center of Photography she led the creation of its online exhibition platform and worked with Viviane Sassen and Nick Brandt, and at Fotografiska Shanghai she led exhibition operations and audience engagement, working with artists including Rinko Kawauchi and Elizaveta Porodina. As an independent curator she has toured the National Geographic photography exhibition to Shenzhen, Harbin and Xi'an, and curated a Shanghai-Osaka anniversary exhibition on Chinese and Japanese visual traditions. She is now developing an international touring project that uses imaging and digital technologies to offer new ways of seeing the millennium-old painting Night Revels of Han Xizai.
Helen Yu
Helen Yu is an art consultant and arts professional based in Australia. She has studied and worked in China, the UK, Singapore and Australia, and holds degrees in Computer Science, International Financial Management, Fine Art and Arts Management. She has more than ten years' experience in the arts, including seven years in gallery management, covering artist representation, exhibition development, collecting, cultural exchange and international projects. She has taken part in Sydney Contemporary, West Bund Art & Design, ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair and international art fairs in Berlin. Her consultancy focuses on finding distinctive artistic practices, supporting artists' long-term development, and connecting artists, collectors and institutions across Australia, China, Asia and the wider international art world.
Emma Phillips
Emma Phillips is an Assistant Professor in Visual Communication in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. She has fourteen years' experience as a professional photographer in Australian media and advertising, and ten years teaching communications and photography in Sydney and Melbourne. Her PhD examined the aesthetics of the sexualisation debates and how image-making can carry classist, sexist and gendered assumptions about women's sexuality. Her practice-based research looks at the representational politics of women's sport, power and class in visual culture, and the elevation of marginalised voices.
Shane Hulbert
Shane Hulbert is an artist, curator and educator specialising in landscape photography. He holds a PhD in Fine Art and has more than 30 years' experience in photographic and fine art education, teaching and delivering masterclasses in Australia, China, Hong Kong, England and South Korea. His work has been exhibited in public galleries and festivals in Australia, China, England, Serbia, South Korea and the US, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash Gallery of Art and the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. He is interested in the connection between history and culture, and in how a deeper knowledge of culture can help photographers and artists become more active and engaged.
Steven Rendall
Steven Rendall (b. UK 1969) moved to Australia in 2000. He studied at De Montfort University, Leicester, and the Royal Academy Schools, London, and completed a PhD at Monash University in 2015. His work, spanning painting, video and sculpture, is littered with references to technology, art history, horror movies and pop music. It is held in collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank, RMIT University and Bendigo Art Gallery.
Moshe Rosenzveig OAM
Moshe Rosenzveig OAM is the founder, creative director and lead curator of Head On Photo Festival, Australia's premier photography event. His career spans more than 40 years as a photojournalist, commercial photographer, educator and award-winning television producer and director at SBS Television. He has led the Head On Awards judging panels since 2004, judged the Walkley Prize for Photojournalism and the City of Sydney's Art & About, and reviewed portfolios at Rencontres d'Arles. In 2018 he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for his contribution to the visual arts, in particular photography.
Alasdair Foster
Alasdair Foster is a writer, researcher and award-winning curator who works worldwide, especially in Asia and Latin America. He was founding director of Fotofeis, the international biennale of photo-based art in Scotland, and from 1998 to 2011 directed the Australian Centre for Photography, extending its international profile and its learning and community programmes. He has also been editor of Photofile magazine, president of Contemporary Art Organisations of Australia and chair of the Conference for European Photographers. Until he retired in 2022 he was Professor of Culture in Community Wellbeing in the School of Public Health at The University of Queensland and Adjunct Professor in the School of Art at RMIT University. He holds a BSc in physics from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD from Monash University on participatory culture and arts policy.
Simon Perry
Simon Perry is a British-born artist who lives and works in Melbourne. For four decades his practice has centred on sculpture, drawing and art in public space, and he has made a broad range of public artworks and exhibited widely in Australia and overseas. He trained at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London, where his awards included the Royal Academy Gold Medal for Sculpture and the Landseer Award, and in 1987 the Rome Prize took him to live and study in Italy. He is a senior lecturer at RMIT University's School of Art, teaching across undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes. His PhD, completed at RMIT in 2020, looked at the relationship between sculptural models and public monuments, and the contested ground of public and private space.
Clara Samson
Clara Samson is a Paris-based gallerist and the founder and director of Galerie Clara Samson, which she set up to support and promote a new generation of contemporary artists. Before opening the gallery she worked across the Paris gallery sector in gallery management, exhibitions, artist relations and the international art market. The gallery focuses on abstraction in painting, sculpture and lumino-kinetic practice. It shows artists whose work deals with form, colour, movement, light, nature and sensory experience.
To be announced
Bio to follow.