Tony Ayres

Tony Ayres is an award winning writer and director in both drama and documentary. His first feature film, Walking on Water won the Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, five AFI Awards, two Film Critic’s Circle Awards and an IF Award.

Tony has made numerous documentaries, including Sadness which won an AFI Award, the Film Critic’s Circle Award for Best Documentary, the ATOM Award for Best Documentary, the AWGIE for Best Documentary script, the Erwin Rado Award for Best Australian Short Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and the Most Popular Film at the Brisbane International Film Festival.

Tony has written extensively for television, including Ghost Story which won the Jury Prize at the 1997 International Cinema and Television Convention in Geneva, and The Long Ride which won the 1994 AFI Award for Best Telefeature or MiniSeries. In theatre, Tony has written one play, The Fat Boy, and edited two one-act plays, Thieving Boy and Like Stars In My Hands. He has also published numerous short stories and edited two anthologies, String of Pearls and Hard.

John Baylis

John Baylis has worked in theatre as performer, dramaturg, manager and director since the late 1970s. He was manager of the One Extra Dance Company (1982-86), a founding coordinator of Performance Space (1983-84) and later its Chair (1992-93), and has worked freelance with Sidetrack, Entr'acte, Gravity Feed, Salamanca Theatre Co, and many others.

In 1986 John co-founded the Sydney Front, a contemporary performance company that made work until 1993, touring throughout Australia as well as Europe. Most recently he was Artistic Director of Urban Theatre Projects in western Sydney (1997-2001). He has been Manager of the Australia Council’s Theatre Board since May 2001.

Teresa Crea

Teresa graduated in Film and Italian Studies at Flinders University and holds a Master of Arts in Contemporary Italian Poetry. In 1986 she won a scholarship to the National Academy of Dramatic Arts (Silvio D’Amico) in Rome where she studied theatre direction.

She was co founder of Doppio Teatro (now para//elo Performance Company), Australia’s first professional bilingual theatre company and has been its Artistic Director since 1991. Teresa has written and devised many productions for the company, which received the Sydney Myer Performing Arts Award for its “distinctive contribution to the Australian Performing Arts” in 1994. The company’s productions have been performed nationally and internationally including in the United Kingdom and Singapore.

Teresa has also worked in television. radio and most recently live arts/new media producing work for SBS Television, ABC Radio, The State Theatre Company and Belvoir St Theatre. She is an active advocate for the arts and cultural diversity; has contributed to the development of national policy, forums and debates; and has held pivotal positions on the Australia Council for the Arts, The Board of the Adelaide Festival of Arts and the ABC Arts Advisory Committee.
In 1995 she received the Federal Government’s inaugural Cultural Diversity in the Arts Award from the then Prime Minister Paul Keating and in 2003 was awarded a Centenary Medal for her contribution to the arts and community.

Wesley Enoch

Wesley Enoch is the eldest son of Doug and Lyn Enoch who hail from Stradbroke Island. Wesley has been Artistic Director of Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts, an Associate Artist with the Queensland Theatre Company, and a Resident Director with the Sydney Theatre Company.

Wesley’s recent directing credits include: Fountains Beyond for the Queensland Theatre Company; Stolen, which premiered at Playbox and has since toured both nationally and internationally; and Romeo and Juliet for the Bell Shakespeare Company.

Whilst resident with the Sydney Theatre Company his productions included Black Medea, The Sunshine Club, Black-ed Up, and The Cherry Pickers. 2002 projects included The Dreamers by Jack Davis for Company B at The Belvoir St Theatre and The 7 Stages of Grieving, co-written with Deborah Mailman, for The Sydney Theatre Company. In 2002 Wesley was the recipient of a Cite International des Arts residency in Paris.

Anna Munster

Anna Munster is a writer, artist and educator in the areas of electronic and new media. Her experimental sound work has been broadcast on The Listening Room (ABC Radio National) and has been exhibited in Japan and the US.

Her new media work is concerned with the relations between early museum visual culture and contemporary digital spaces and has taken the form of interactive and web-based work (see 'wundernet', http://wundernet.cofa.unsw.edu.au). Recently she has concentrated on theoretical work that examines the relations between new media technologies, aesthetics and corporeality. She is currently completing a book on these topics. Her writing has appeared in online journals such as 'culturemachine' and 'ctheory' and in journals and papers such as Artlink, Photofile and Realtime. Her current research looks at science, ethics and aesthetics, for which she holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.

She is a lecturer in new media theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. She is also a facilitator of the online discussion list 'fibreculture' (www.fibreculture.org) and an editor of its forthcoming online journal.

David Pledger

David Pledger works across media as a performance director, film-maker, choreographer, writer, dramaturg and an instigator and collaborator in new media projects. His work has been presented in Europe, Asia, the USA and Australia in diverse contexts such as theatre and film festivals, art galleries and public spaces.

David is the recipient of the Sydney Myer Performing Arts Award, the Kenneth Myer Performing Arts Medal, a Churchill Fellowship and numerous production and travel grants from foreign affairs, performing arts and film commissioning agencies. He has received a number of overseas appointments including Visiting Professor at the Korean National University of Arts (1994, 1997), Workshop Leader at the International TeaterTreffen of the Berlin Theatre Festival (1995,1999), and, most recently, Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Media and Art (ZKM) in Germany.

David is the founding artistic director and producer of the award-winning hybrid art performance group, not yet it’s difficult. Established in 1995, the company has a unique presence in Australia’s contemporary performing arts culture as a research unit, a producer of industry development programs and a contemporary events maker. not yet it’s difficult has produced site-specific performances, public space projects, play productions, video-installation, television, and, in association with other performance companies, workshop, forum, research and development programs.