David Cross is Professor of Visual Arts at Deakin. Working as an artist, curator and writer, his practice extends across performance, installation, sculpture, public art and video. Known for his examination of risk, pleasure and participation, Cross often utilises inflatable structures to negotiate inter-personal exchange. He has performed in international live art festivals in Poland and Croatia and was selected as a New Zealand representative at the 2011 Prague Quadrennial. Cross was commissioned by National Institute of Experimental Art/City of Sydney to develop Drift, a large-scale public art commission for Taylors Square in Sydney (2011) and his installation Lean was included in The Aberrant Object at Wellington City Art Gallery (2012). His work Hold was selected for inclusion in Liveworks at Performance Space, Sydney in 2010 and featured as part of the Arts House season in the Melbourne International Festival in October 2012. More recently he was commissioned by Scape Public Art 7 curator Blair French to develop Level Playing Field, a temporary intervention that fused sport, performance and sculpture in Christchurch. A monograph of his work Air Supplied was published by Punctum Books, Los Angeles in 2018.

As a curator and public art facilitator he developed with Claire Doherty the One Day Sculpture project across New Zealand in 2008/9 featuring 30 international artists including Thomas Hirschhorn, Superflex, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Paula Pivi. In 2011 he was CAST Tasmania's international curatorial resident. From this project he curated Iteration:Again 13 Public Art Projects Across Tasmania examing the idea of repetition and transformation in temporary public art and featuring 20 local and international artists. He has edited internationally published books on the aforementioned projects and writes regularly on contemporary art for international publications.In 2017 he co-founded with Cameron Bishop the research initiative Public Art Commission (PAC) at Deakin University which is devoted to the commissioning and scholarship of temporary public art. Recent PAC projects all co-developed with Cameron Bishop include, Treatment with Melbourne Water and City of Wyndham (2015. 2017, 2021), Venetian Blind with European Cultural Centre, Venice (2019), Six Moments in Kingston for the City of Kingston (2019) Front Beach

Back Beach {Cameron Bishop and Danny Lacy} (2022) and Treatment 3 (2023).

Cross is currently Professor of Visual Arts and Research Leader of the new research initative Public Exchange Bureau @ Deakin

Simon is the Lead Designer at Convic, managing the creative direction of the team.  With over 17 years’ experience as a Landscape Architect, he is a highly motivated, innovative, and creative designer. His breadth of both landscape and youth recreation experience extends to projects across Australia, New Zealand and international regions including recent projects in Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai.

His ongoing passion for skateboarding and general youth activation has expanded his design capabilities to create multi-generational spaces.  Utilising contextual and spatial landscape architectural thinking, Simon creates unique and responsive design outcomes. Coupled with his extensive community engagement experience and warm approachable manner, Simon has a range of skills leading many complex and significant projects. This is demonstrated through Simon’s recent award of the Adelaide City Prize an AIA National Architecture award for the Adelaide City Skatepark.

Convic

Felicity Fenner is a curator of contemporary and public art. She is Chair of the City of Sydney’s Public Art Advisory Panel and a public art advisor on local and state government infrastructure projects. Based at UNSW Sydney as an Associate Professor in curatorial studies, she was the inaugural Director (2010-2018) of UNSW Galleries, establishing the museum as a leading centre for Australian and international contemporary art.

Recent books include 'Curating in a time of Ecological Crisis: biennales as agents of change’ (Routledge, 2022), ‘Readymade Ruin: Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro’ (Formist, 2023) and Roslyn Oxley9: the first forty years’ (Formist, 2024). She is also the author of 'Running the City: why public art matters' (NewSouth, 2017) and is currently working on an anthology about new directions in public art, ‘Shifting Ground: the evolving role of art in the Australian public domain’ (Formist, 2025).

Lian Loke is Associate Professor in Interaction Design Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney.

Loke is passionate about making our cities, streets and public spaces more creative, playable and liveable. The Playful Cities agenda promotes the design of digital activations in urban space to encourage play and creativity, through partnerships with the Inner West Council and Willoughby City Council since 2017. She has supervised PhD and Masters students in researching and designing playful interventions in public space, most notably for Vivid Sydney festival (2015-2018). In 2019 she curated the successful ElectroSK8 event for EDGE Sydenham, Inner West Council; a mixed performance event that transformed the skatepark incorporating skating, dancing and a light show.

Loke’s research in the field of human-computer and human-robot interaction studies and stages the interactivity of humans and machines through a choreographic and somaesthetic lens. Her work explores how to design embodied and movement-based interactions and experiences with emerging technologies that support human agency, creative expression, skill and vitality.

The Tactile Playgrounds ARC funded (2024-2026) research project will explore how to design accessible playgrounds for children with vision impairment, through co-design with the blind and low vision community.

She was a member of the Arts and Cultural Advisory Committee of the Inner West Council, contributing to strategy and policy formation. She is a founding member of the Inner West Creative Network, an artist-run, not-for-profit organisation, established in 2022 and supported by the Inner West Council.

Kel Glaister has been coaching parkour in Melbourne and Scotland since 2014, and believes passionately that parkour and movement are for everybody. Kel has worked for years to help dismantle gender bias in parkour, with Women of Melbourne Parkour and previously with Glasgow Parkour Girls and Edinburgh Parkour Women; she has also organised women-focused events like WamJam in Australia and the IWD Clamjamfrie, the first women’s parkour event in the UK. Additionally, she is a founding director of Melbourne in Motion, a parkour and movement-coaching organisation with a focus on inclusivity and diversity. Outside parkour, Kel is a visual artist with a MFA from the Glasgow School of Art.

Mikayla Journee is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Auckland, researching Social Practice Art and 'place making' in Aotearoa. Her focus is on walking and exchange-based art practices, public art/art in the public realm, inter-disciplinary, socially engaged/participatory contemporary art.

Nicole Kalms is a Professor in the Department of Design and founding director of the Monash University XYX Lab which leads national and international research in Gender and Place. Nicole is the Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.

Nicole has a PhD in Architecture from Monash University. She obtained her Bachelor Degree in Architecture from RMIT and practiced architecture for several years before undertaking a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture (RMIT). Nicole is a full-time member of Monash University’s Faculty Art, Design and Architecture where she is focused on cross-disciplinary research.

Dr Kalms’ scholarly contributions include the edited book Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space (Routledge 2021), the monograph Hypersexual City: The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism (Routledge 2017) examining sexualized representation and precincts in neoliberal cities. Her recent monograph She City: A Design Handbook for Challenging Inequity in Cities (Bloomsbury) will draw on interdisciplinary research and case studies from gender scholars, design practitioners, and feminist activists to update the significant research on gender and the city. 

The innovation of Kalms’ research is the examination of digital, experiential, political and material interventions collated to articulate both the shared and conflicted struggles of minoritised communities internationally. Her praxis repositions design as a strategic tool for challenging  inequity.

Dr Kalms regularly writes for a diverse non-academic audience, and is frequently invited to speak to the public about identity and urban space at major national and international cultural institutions. Kalms has been interviewed on BBC World TV (2018) and France 24 TV (2019). Kalms was the keynote speaker at the Planning Institute of Australia  Congress (2019) and the Autonomy Mobility Summit in Paris (2019). Dr Kalms serves on a variety of advisory boards, committees and panels in relation to public policy, urban safety and placemaking. 

Director XYX Lab | Gender + Place
Associate Dean (Research)

MONASH ART DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE

Monash University

Sue McGill is the Director, Participation Growth at the Australian Sports Commission and a skateboarder. Sue has a Masters in Public Policy, a degree in Sports Management and a passion for sharing the power of sport with those who can benefit the most. Skateboarding has taught Sue resilience, provided a sense of belonging, built courage and delivered absolute joy. Sue was instrumental in the development of Australia's first national participation strategy Play Well, and works with sport organisations across the country to ensure everyone has a place in sport.

Duncan McDuie-Ra is Professor of urban sociology at the University of Newcastle and Associate Dean of Research. Duncan’s main research interests are urban migration, urban culture, urban play and urban technology. Duncan’s books on skateboarding include Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2021) and Skateboard Video: Archiving the City from Below (Springer, 2021). Duncan's monographs on Northeast India include Borderland City in New India: frontier to gateway (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2016); Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, refuge and retail (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2012), Debating Race in Contemporary India (Springer, 2015), and the co-authored Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism and Urbanism in Dimapur (with D. Kikon, Oxford Univ Press, 2021). Duncan has authored over 60 journal articles and essays including in the journals Political Geography, Memory Studies, Geographical Journal, Modern Asian Studies and Mobilities. Duncan is a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts (2023-25).

LEAD RESEARCHER, ART/PLAY/RISK

Artist and senior lecturer Sanné Mestrom, is a DECRA fellow for her project

"ART/PLAY/RISK: An interdisciplinary approach to child-friendly cities."

This project, investigating how artworks enhance public spaces, particularly in terms of risk-in-play, contributes uniquely to the discipline's boundaries. A pivotal aspect involves developing a child-led playable sculpture project, offering insights into children's preferences for art in urban landscapes, addressing issues of risk, creativity, challenge, and comfort.

Dr. Mestrom’s practice-led research seeks to incorporate “play” into a socially engaged practice as a means to question the social consequences of urban design. Her current research investigates ways that art in public places – and urban design more broadly - can become critically integrated, inclusive and interactive spaces. To do so, her projects bring together sculpture and the body to examine the role of art in rewriting current definitions of ‘play’ as relating to the physical, experiential and ideological conditions of ‘place’. Creating temporary and permanent sculptural forms that respond to the built environment and our movement through it, softens the separation of art and everyday life; it is through this ‘softness’ that play has the potential to open up a space to escape certain logics, and denying logic is itself a subversive – and therefore political– action.

Mestrom's website

Nadia Odlum is an artist from Sydney, Australia, whose practice explores the material language and everyday practices of urban space. Nadia is the Research Assistant for the ART/PLAY/RISK project, led by Dr. Sanné Mestrom.

Drawing upon diverse mediums and methods, Nadia's abstract works poetically reconfigure urban systems to explore the interplay between bodies and environments. By facilitating playful and creative engagements with the nuances of urban life,  Odlum’s work invites viewers to consider the complex relationships we form with the material and social textures of our lived environments.

Odlum’s work has been shown in galleries and public spaces across Australia and internationally. This includes presentations at the Art Gallery of NSW, Carriageworks, Artspace, Home of the Arts (HOTA) and MANA Contemporary USA, as well as public art commissions for Urban Art Projects and the City of Parramatta Council and pedagogical projects for Kaldor Public Art Projects and The Powerhouse Museum.

Nadia Odlum is a past artist in residence at Parramatta Artists’ Studios Rydalmere, and a current PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.

Nadia Odlum's website

Amy is a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at RMIT School of Art. She is a practicing artist, curator, writer and researcher in the field of public and socially engaged art.

Amy's socially engaged, critical art practice and research aims to prompt questions and debate about present society particularly about the gaps and silences in public discourse where difficult histories and social issues are overlooked or smoothed over.

As an artist, Amy has been commissioned to present numerous art projects across Australia and internationally, including at Fremantle Arts Centre, Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne), the Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg), MONA FOMA (Hobart) and the 2015 Vienna Biennale. Additionally, Amy has curated and produced a number of symposia, exhibitions and public engagement programs including "Counter-monuments: Indigenous settler relations in Australian contemporary art and memorial practices" with Genevieve Grieves and hosted by Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (ACCA) in March 2021.

Amy has also published work widely in academic journals, exhibition catalogues and art magazines, including writing for Artlink, Public Art Dialogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Journal of Arts and Communities. Most recently she co-edited "Let's Go Outside: Art in Public" with Charlotte Day and Callum Morton for Monash University Museum of Art (Monash University Publishing 2022) and co-authored "Art/Work: Social Enterprise, Young Creatives & the Forces of Marginalisation" with Dr Grace McQuilten, Associate Professor Kim Humphery and Professor Peter Kelly (Palgrave Pivot, forthcoming 2022.

amyspiers.com.au

Keg de Souza is an artist of Goan ancestry who lives on unceded Gadigal land in Sydney. Architecturally trained, she creates social and spatial environments, making reference to her lived experiences of squatting and organising with projects that use plant and food politics, temporary architecture, publishing and radical pedagogy. De Souza also draws from personal experiences of colonialism to inform her layered projects that centre voices that are often marginalised, for learning about Place. Themes of displacement – through lenses such as colonialism and gentrification – filter through her work, sharing (often lesser-known) stories of plants, people and Place.

Exhibitions and projects include: Shipping Roots (2023), Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; Nganga toornung-nge dharraga Bunjil (2022), Abbotsford Convent Co-commisioned with ACCA, Melbourne; Convivial City (2019), Open Plan Commission, South London Gallery; Common Knowledge and Learning Curves (2019), Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane and (2018) Artspace, Sydney; The National: New Australian Art, (2017) AGNSW; 20th Biennale of Sydney and Setouchi Triennale (2016), Japan; Temporary Spaces, Edible Places: Vancouver and Preservation (2015) as part of a multi-year project with Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Temporality in Architecture, Food and Communities (2014), Delfina Foundation, London; Temporary Spaces, Edible Places: Isle of Skye (2014), Atlas Arts and If There’s Something Strange In Your Neighbourhood (2013), Ratmakan Kampung, Yogyakarta; 5th Auckland Triennial, 15th Jakarta Biennale and Vertical Villages (with ruangrupa) at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney.

Dr. Indigo Willing works on several community initiatives dedicated to ‘non-traditional’ skateboarders. Her research combines insights from the humanities and social sciences including the sociology of youth cultures and subcultures and participation in creative sports.In 2024 she is a Social Science Fellow at SSSHARC, The University of Sydney for the Skate, Create, Educate and Regenerate project. Dr Willing is the co-author of the book Skateboarding, Power and Change with Anthony Pappalardo and illustrations by Adam Abada (2023, Palgrave MacMillan). 

Dr. Willing’s writing is also published in peer-reviewed international academic journals (DIY, Alternative Cultures and Society; Cities and Health; Leisure Studies; Sociology; Sport in Society; Young Nordic Journal), in an edited collection Skateboarding: Subcultures, Sites and Shifts by K J Lombard (Routledge) and in free to access articles (ABC Sport/Siren Sport; Broad Agenda; The Conversation; Yeah Girl Media, Quell Magazine; and Skateism).

Dr. Willing’s skate activities have also been featured in various media stories and online platforms. Her collaborative community work includes being the co-founder of the We Skate QLD  With strong international ties and networks, Dr Willing is also the project leader and co-founder of Consent is Rad (@consent_is_rad on Instagram) which is an international campaign invited to be a part of the ‘Break the Cycle’ collaborative campaign that has run in Thrasher Magazine (USA) and numerous other leading skate magazines internationally. In 2021 Consent is Rad was awarded 2nd place in the Social Projects category of the Exposure Skate Rising Awards in the USA.  In 2023 Consent is Rad won the Social Project of the Year award from Skate Like a Girl in a tie with Nations Skate Youth (Canada). Dr Willing also co-founded the Skating, Sustainability, Health Research and Environmental Design (SSHRED) project with outputs such as a special issue for the peer-reviewed journal Leisure Studies and a monthly seminar series that highlights contemporary research on skating and the environment.