A Thousand Words: Art and Storytelling in Melbourne Now

Susie Anderson writes from the nexus of compassion and resistance. Her poetry and nonfiction are widely published online and in print, such as in Archer, Artist Profile, Artlink, un magazine, Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia and in many poetry anthologies.

In 2018, she was runner-up in the Overland Poetry Prize and awarded the Emerging Writer's Fellowship at State Library Victoria; in 2019, she was awarded a Writer's Victoria Neilma Sidney Grant and a recipient of the Overland Writers Residency. In 2020, she edited the online journal, Tell Me Like You Mean It Volume 4, for Australian Poetry and Cordite Poetry Review. She is a 2021 black&write! Fellow.

Her professional practice is as a digital producer in the arts and creative industries ranging from Sydney, London and Melbourne. Leveraging her position within institutions, she attempts to bring about change by uncovering and amplifying stories from her own and other communities. Descended from the Wergaia and Wemba Wemba peoples of Western Victoria, she currently lives on Boon Wurrung land in Melbourne. 

Mia Boe is a painter from Brisbane with Butchulla and Burmese ancestry. The inheritance and disinheritance of both cultures is the focus of her practice. Boe’s paintings respond, sometimes obliquely, to historical and contemporary acts of violence perpetrated on the people and lands of Burma and Australia.

Anna Emina El Samad is an educator, curator and writer based in Naarm. Having completed a thesis on diversity in the arts titled: (Re)claiming the Narrative: Amplifying the Voices of Australian Muslim Artists, Anna has centered her practice around collaboration and seeks to create accessible opportunities for people of colour to connect with contemporary art in Australia.

Deanna Hitti is an Australian artist based in Melbourne with Lebanese heritage. Her multi-disciplinary arts practice spans over 25 years. Referencing historical and cultural material, she highlights the foundations of different ideas and representations of the Middle East. Deanna employs different methods of printing such as Screen printing and Cyanotype to create her artist books and large scaled prints. Her comprehensive books and installations have recently been commissioned by the State Library of Victoria. Her books have been short listed in numerous Australian art prizes and her successful artist book Towla is the recipient of the 2018 Fremantle Art Centre Print Award. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in group and solo shows and has been acquired by major Australian institutions including The State Library of Victoria and The National Library of Australia.

Maya Hodge is a Lardil and Yangkaal emerging writer and curator based on the lands of the Kulin Nation. Her practice is dedicated to disrupting colonial narratives and centering First Nations storytelling and autonomy. Maya’s writing and poetry have been published by Australian Poetry, Kill Your Darlings, Craft Victoria, Hardie Grant, Cordite Poetry Review, and Overland. In 2021, she was selected as a runner-up for the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition and this year was shortlisted for the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize.

Kelly is a descendant of the Wergaia and Wamba Wamba tribes of northwest Victoria. Their practice has included sculpture, painting and printmaking. They have explored south-eastern Aboriginal cultural heritage, significantly work producing possum skin cloaks and experimenting with possum skins to produce print making works on paper and fabric. The hand printed fur images have an ethereal quality. They consider making possum skin cloaks an act of living their sovereignty. As a result of their working life in Indigenous affairs, they created a series of silkscreen prints titled The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, which evolved from direct experience of relationships between Blacks and Whites. Their current work involves a meeting of their print making practice and their heritage.

Myles is the Senior Curator of Australian and First Nations Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Myles is responsible for the NGV’s collections of Australian Art, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art and the Art of Oceania, as well as work by First Nations artists globally. Myles has a long-standing interest in cultural, gender and sexual diversity within both Australian and International contemporary practice, and has worked across a broad range of exhibitions and projects. Myles is one of a team of curators who collectively oversee major contemporary art exhibitions including NGV Triennial, and Melbourne Now.