People

Brian has been a practising artist for thirty years and has exhibited both nationally and internationally specifically in the media of painting and drawing. His research and practice focuses on refiguring Australian art and culture from an Indigenous ideological perspective based on a reciprocal relationship to “Country”.

Peta recently participated in The Koorie Heritage Trust’s “Fostering Koorie Art and Culture Residency Program”, during which, she collaborated with the Dja Dja Wurrung community to research, develop and create a major series of large format landscape photographs responding to a massacre site on their Country. The residency culminated in the solo exhibition 'Undercurrent', presented at the Koorie Heritage Trust 8 March – 28 April 2019.

Carolyn is a Boon Wurrung senior elder and is the chairperson and founder of the Boon Wurrung Foundation. She has been involved in developing and supporting opportunities for Indigenous youth and Boon Wurrung culture for over 50 years.

Brook is Director of NIRIN - the 2020 Biennale of Sydney. From 2016–2018, Brook led an international team of researchers in “Representation, Remembrance and the Memorial,” a visual arts research project that investigated the possibility of representing the magnitude of Indigenous loss and survival in the Australian frontier wars via a national memorial.

Desiree Ibinarriaga, Indigenous Mexican woman with Chamula (Mayan), Nahua (Aztec) and Euskaldunak (Basque) heritage. Desiree is a creative practitioner, collaborative and social design maker and thinker. She is Lecturer at Monash Art Design and Architecture, and Coordinator for Indigenous Higher Degrees by Research being part of Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab.

Dr Kirsten Lyttle is the Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab. Kirsten is a Māori wāhine academic, artist and creative practice-led researcher (Iwi/tribe: Waikato, Waka/Canoe: Tainui, Hapū/Subtribe: Ngāti Tahinga). Her primary research interests are: Indigenous-centred methodologies and knowledge systems, Indigenous customary art practices and their application to technologies such as photography and video.

James Oliver is a Hebridean Gàidheal and adjunct staff member of Wominjeka Djeembana and the department of Design. He has been an international contributor to 2017’s and to 2019’s Yirramboi Festival. He has also published Associations: creative practice and research, an anthology on doing research for, through, and with creative practices, particularly in the higher education sector. He continues to collaborate with Wominjeka Djeembana on Indigenous Practice Research and Graduate Research-Creation. He is an Associate Professor of Design at RMIT University.

Jessica Neath is a non-Indigenous Australian of settler descent and has been supporting research development at Djeembana since October 2019. In February 2021 she commenced as Research Fellow on the Australian Research Council project “More than a guulany: Indigenous Knowledge Systems” led by Dr Brian Martin and Associate Professor Brook Garru Andrew.

Moorina Bonini is a proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta Dhulunyagen family clan of Ulupna and the Yorta Yorta and Wurundjeri Briggs/McCrae family. Moorina is an artist whose works are informed by her experiences as an Aboriginal and Italian woman. Her practice is driven by a self-reflexive methodology that enables the reexamination of lived experiences that have influenced the construction of her cultural identity. By unsettling the narrative placed upon Aboriginal people as a result of colonisation of Aboriginal Australia, Bonini’s practice is based within Indigenous Knowledge systems and brings this to the fore.