Nici Cumpston is a proud Barkandji artist, curator, writer and educator. Having studied fine arts, specialising in Photography at the University of South Australia, she has worked as a photographic lecturer and wrote and delivered the inaugural course Indigenous Art, Culture and Design at the University of South Australia.

Cumpston is the Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia and since 2014 has also been the Artistic Director of Tarnanthi a biennial citywide festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art with an annual Art Fair and major exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

She has been exhibiting her works of art since 1998 and in that time has been invited to participate in many prestigious awards and group exhibitions. Her work is held in major institutions and private collections nationally and internationally. Cumpston combines her time curating, collaborating and creating her own photographic works that share stories of Aboriginal occupation and ongoing survival on the land.

Image by Saul Steed.

Dr. Alasdair Foster is a writer, researcher and award-winning curator who works worldwide, especially in Asia and Latin America. He is Ambassador to the Asia-Pacific PhotoForum and publisher of the Talking Pictures – interviews with photographers around the world. He has twenty years’ experience heading national arts institutions in Europe and Australia, and over thirty-five years of working in the public cultural sector.

He was previously director of the Australia Centre for Photography (1998–2011) and founding director of Fotofeis, the award-winning international festival of photo-based art in Scotland (1991–1997), the largest photographic event in Europe in the 1990s. He has served as managing editor of Photofile magazine (1998–2009), president of the Contemporary Arts Organisations of Australia and Chairman of the Conference for European Photographers.

Alasdair has curated several hundred exhibitions in Europe and Oceania and, further afield, in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Dubai, Guatemala, Russia and Singapore. He has written extensively on photography for books, journals and periodicals in many parts of the world, and sat on the selection panel for many photographic awards nationally and internationally.

Alasdair Foster is currently Professor of Culture in Community Wellbeing in the School of Public Health at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Art of RMIT University, Melbourne.

Image by Murray Fredericks.

Since 2010, Sunyoung Kim has been working for The Museum of Photography, Seoul (MoPS) as Curator in charge of exhibitions and international relations. Kim graduated with a Bachelor of Creative Arts at The University of Melbourne, and received her M.A. in Art Theory from Korea National University of Arts.

Kim served as a juror for Sony World Photography Award 2021, Portrait of Humanity 2021/The British Journal of Photography&1854 Media, PHOTOFAIRS 2020 Exposure Award and Onbit Documentary Final Portfolio Awards 2020, and as a portfolio reviewer in various platforms. She acted as co-curator for Brassaï, Koudelka, Giacomelli: Romantic Melancholy and Greetings from South Korea, presented in Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival 2019, 2018 respectively. Recently organized a show, titled The Centennial of Korean art photography 1920-2020, currently being shown at The State Russian Museum and Exhibition Centre (ROSPHOTO) and scheduled to present in The Lithuanian National Museum of Art in 2022.

Kim has been responsible for the series of Korean Emerging Artist shows based upon the MoPS’s Portfolio Open Call since 2015. She co-published the book Performance, Politics of Body: Criticism and Meta Criticism.

Vikki McInnes is a writer, curator and director of Sarah Scout Presents, a private gallery she established with Kate Barber in 2009 to represent and develop opportunities for Australian artists with critically-engaged, conceptually-driven art practices. She is also co-founder of the contemporary art fair Spring1883, which was established in 2014 to consider alternative industry paradigms.

Alongside these private contexts, McInnes is coordinator of the Master of Fine Arts Program at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and managing editor of Art + Australia, which has been published at the VCA since 2016. She has worked in Victoria’s contemporary arts sector for 25 years including from 1996–2003 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), where she was program manager. From 2003–4 she was curator at the TarraWarra Museum of Art and from 2005–15 director of the Margaret Lawrence Gallery. She is also currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Melbourne considering contemporary feminist art practice and the archive in Australia.

McInnes has written for art publications including Art + Australia, Art Monthly, Photofile, un Magazine and Australian Art Collector, and has edited four collections of writings on contemporary art: Red (2001, with Stuart Koop), Bureau (2009, with Kate Daw), Fabrication: artists writing on art in Melbourne (2012) and Bureau 2 (2014).

In addition to local curatorial programs, McInnes has extensive experience developing and managing significant international projects. These have included Neverwhere (Istanbul, 2015), Sleep on the Left Side (Delhi, 2012) and Silenzi (Venice, 2006) as well as participation in the India Art Fair (2012 and 2013) and the Auckland Art Fair (2016 and 2018). She has been invited to participate in DFAT programs in India and Turkey and has established collaborative partnerships with Asialink, Creative Victoria, the Australia India Institute and the Australia Council for the Arts to deliver these projects.

Talia Smith is an artist and curator from Aotearoa, New Zealand and based in Warrang, Sydney. She is of Cook Island, Samoan and New Zealand European heritage. Her artistic and curatorial practice explores time, memory and familial histories with a focus on time based practices. Smith is currently researching and creating an archive of Moana heritage video and moving image artists which saw its first exhibition and publication presented at Artspace Sydney in 2019.

She has curated exhibitions at various institutions in Australia and New Zealand such as the churchie emerging art prize at IMA Brisbane, In a World of Wounds at Artbank Sydney, Here is your Horizon at Cement Fondu, More than all the Ocean between us at Artspace Sydney and The Shape of Memory at The Lock-up Newcastle among others. She was the emerging curator at Firstdraft in 2017, Artbank’s emerging curator in 2018 and participated in 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s curatorial intensive in 2016 and was named one of Art Collector’s ‘tastemakers’ for their 2018 ’50 things you should know’ issue.

Smith’s writing has appeared in various publications and catalogue essays such as VAULT Magazine, Art Almanac and Running Dog. In 2020 she completed a two month curatorial residency at Basis in Frankfurt, Germany and has recently completed her Masters of Fine Arts (Research) at UNSW, Sydney. She currently works as the curator at Granville Centre Art Gallery in Sydney.

Jake Treacy is a curator, arts writer and poet working on the unceded sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri woi-wurrung and Boon Wurrung Peoples of the Kulin Nation. They are a queer, non-binary person who is interested in radical gestures of love, transformation and healing through community collaboration. Their practice employs numinous acts through exhibition-making, performativity, and the spoken and written word.

They are a University of Melbourne graduate with a Master of Art Curatorship (2017) and Postgraduate Art History (2013) who has previously co-directed an artist-run initiative, sat on grant advisory panels, and written published copy on numerous contemporary arts practices. They currently curate at Incinerator Gallery and sit on the BLINDSIDE board of Artistic Directors, having previously curated across national art galleries as well as non-conventional public spaces, participated in a creative symposia, and performed poetic dissertations. Their current practice and research is informed by dreams, sex, queer mysticism, and doom metal.

Image courtesy of Georgia Kartas.