Zoë Rodriguez

Zoë is a lawyer at the Arts Law Centre of Australia, a community law centre serving individual artists and arts organisations. She works in policy development, drafting submissions to government; provides legal advice to individual creators working in all art forms, and assists in the development of licensing arrangements for the ethical trade in artists’ IP.

Before this, Zoë was a lawyer at Copyright Agency, a not-for-profit that manages the collective copyright interests of Australia’s authors, artists and publishers. She regularly writes articles and gives presentations on copyright and developments in publishing around Australia, and is active in responding to policy issues of relevance to Australian creators. 

From 2008 to 2017, Zoë managed Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. This provides around $2 million annually to support a wide variety of projects that support Australia’s visual arts and publishing industries, including practical training and workshops for emerging and mid-career creators, prizes for authors and artists, initiatives that assist Copyright Agency’s members to develop new markets for their works – especially ones that assist with transitioning to the digital environment – and activities that will raise awareness of issues for Australian creators.

Before becoming a lawyer, Zoë provided policy advice, ran the visa office and was the speech writer for the Korean Consulate-General in Sydney. This followed two years working for the Korean Ministry of Education in South Korea where she was engaged with a number of other English language teachers from English-speaking countries to train Korean English teachers, and to assist in the development of a new syllabus to supplant the syllabus which had existed in Korea since Japanese occupation.