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Trà Mi Dinh is an award-winning choreographer and dancer working across Naarm/Melbourne and Gadigal/Sydney. Her choreographic work is built upon an unrelenting fascination with time; harnessing the dancing body to magnify and disrupt linearity and expectation. Trà Mi is invested in movement that is virtuosic, precise, absurd, embodied, surprising, energetic, and rhythmic.

In 2022, Trà Mi won the Keir Choreographic Award, for her duet The ___. Her choreographic works include HOLDING (2021), The ___ (Commission for the Keir Choreographic Award 2022), And, again (2022), (UP)HOLDING (2023), Not the Piece (2023), Somewhere between ten and fourteen (Commission by Sydney Dance Company, 2023). Her choreographic practice has been supported through residencies with Bundanon, Australian Dance Theatre, Critical Path, Lucy Guerin Inc, DirtyFeet, Tasdance, Sydney Fringe, Ausdance NSW. Currently, Trà Mi is an Artist in Residence at The Substation.

Trà Mi has danced for Lucy Guerin Inc in multiple major works; Make Your Own World (2019), The Clock: Timepiece (2019), Pendulum (2021/22/23), Flux Job (2021), and NEWRETRO (2023). Recently she stepped into Guerin’s iconic duet work Split (2017) performing at Seoul International Dance Festival (2023). In 2023 she joined the cast of Stephanie Lake’s Manifesto (2021), performing in recent shows in Melbourne, Auckland, Madrid, and Châlons-en-Champagne. Trà Mi has danced for many celebrated artists and companies including Chunky Move, Joel Bray Dance, Michelle Heaven, Victoria Chiu, Dance Makers Collective and more. Trà Mi graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance) from Victorian College of the Arts in 2014.

Narjis Mirza is a media installation artist who orchestrates a poetic, philosophical, and spiritual exploration of light through sensory installations. Her work encompasses large-scale light and sound installations, seamlessly integrating projection, animation, video, textile, and voice. Through immersive experiences, she invites viewers to actively participate, transforming her artworks into interactive events.

Initially trained as a painter, Narjis graduated with the highest honour of distinction from the National College of Arts in Pakistan before pursuing a Master’s in Media and Design at Bilkent University, Ankara. Her journey led her to exhibit her work in Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan. In 2017, she was honoured with the Vice Chancellor’s Doctoral Scholarship, culminating in a practice-led PhD at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Narjis contributed to the development of interactive participatory media art at the Interactive Media Lab, University of New South Wales.

Her research has produced a body of work, notably the multisensory installation Hayakal al Noor, Bodies of Light, inspired by Islamic philosophy, and her latest work, Rahma: Our Creative Feminine.

 

Maissa Alameddine grew up in Tripoli Lebanon and now lives and works on the unceded lands of the Cammeraygal and Dharug peoples. Maissa is a multidisciplinary artist, vocalist, performer, and creative producer working across a range of mediums.

Maissa’s work explores the idea of migration as a chronic injury. Maissa inherited her voice from a long line of women vocalists, she uses voice as a provocation and a response. Her work is personal, exploring inheritance and transference of heritage in the complexity of what is coined by Lebanese Australian anthropologist, Ghassan Hage as the ‘lenticular diasporic existence’. Her interpretive song and music is an attempt to honour her ancestors.

Maissa has been part of the contemporary Arab Australian arts community for over twenty years, performing with Arabic music ensembles, Western orchestras, and art organisations. She is a founding member and one of the creative producers of Western Sydney-based Arab Theatre Studio.

Blak Social is an Indigenous arts company dreamed into existence by Alethea Beetson (Kabi Kabi/Gubbi Gubbi and Wiradjuri). We currently work across music, performance and film. Alethea Beetson established Blak Social after successfully founding a renowned Indigenous youth arts organisation, Digi Youth Arts, to continue creating spaces for the sovereign-led development and presentation of Indigenous stories and connected arts practice.

Blak Social’s previous and current work includes:

• Queen’s City at Brisbane Festival 2022
• Blak Friday (An Indiginised fright night at The Greaser 2022)
• Blak Narrative Music Videos: Volume one - A visual album written and directed by Alethea Beetson for First Nations led band Selve
• Blak Social’s residency at The Tivoli Brisbane including:
• Blak Day Out 2022 ft. Shakaya, Barkaa, The Merindas, Alice Skye and more
• Blak Day Out 2023 ft. The Last Kinection, Birdz, Cloe Terare, DRMNGNOW, Kee’ahn, Djanaba and more
• Blak Social Records - a sovereign label, distribution and management service for First Nations artists. Through which BNMV’s visual album, Red Desert Dream, will be released in 2023. Also being released in 2023 through BSR is the Queen’s City Soundtrack.
• Blak Social knows how to have fun while burning down the colony. Creating hilarious and viscous stories that rewrite history, Indiginise popular culture and are an assault to the senses while traversing deep time and being meta as fuck.

 

Em Yali's artistic journey has been shaped by their extensive and dynamic training under the guidance of renowned dance practitioners Emily Cooper, Emma Saunders and Sarah Boulter. Drawing inspiration from their personal experiences, Em explores the intersection of social conditioning, particularly focusing on the AFAB non-binary neuro-divergent experience. Through a blend of movement improvisation, character work, and experimental exploration, they delve into the dynamics of physical, spiritual, and emotional environmental relations, offering profound insights into the human psyche. Their practice extends beyond traditional boundaries, incorporating costume and soft sculpture to create a universal visual language. Collaborating and learning from artists such as Emma Saunders, Sarah-Vynn Vassallo, and Jan Walter, Em continues to evolve and innovate, pushing the boundaries of creativity. Em Yali’s dynamic approach and commitment to artistic growth are evident within their multidimensional performances, which captivate and inspire audiences.

Tahlia Palmer is an artist of Murri and mixed settler descent, born on Whadjuk boodjar, based on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung biik, working predominantly across sound and video to explore history, identity, perception and trauma. Palmer's practice is both intensely personal and grounded in place- based research. Her musical pseudonym, amby downs, is taken from one of the pastoral stations in so-called Queensland on which her Murri ancestors and kin worked in servitude.

Li Yi-Fan is an artist who describes his production process as staging a death match between artist and software until a narrative work quietly unfolds from the decaying corpse of their confrontation. The artist laboriously develops his own software tools for video production: a personal, DIY system that nonetheless rivals capabilities in the resource-intensive digital special effects industry. Incorporating a video game engine that allows him to improvise in real time with detailed 3D animations, Li reflects on both the strange suspension of time and space within games, but also on the increasingly detailed desires that arise from increasingly complex technical tools.

Harrison Hall’s work situates contemporary performance and dance in experiential art environments. His recent works traverse states of flux within digital and live worlds, working to increase the embodied experience in mixed digital and live performance contexts.

In 2021 Harrison completed a Solitude1 Residency from the Tanja Liedtke foundation and Chunky Move, within that context he presented BONANZA! with Dr. Sam Mcgilp, a PerformancexDialogue media artwork that included conversations with NAXS Future (Taiwanese audiovisual art collective) and Lu Yang (Chinese digital artist). This work was a Green Room Award winner and selected for the Melbourne International Film Festival.

These projects have since led to Harrison collaborating on Lu Yang’s Doku, first at ACMI and then most recently at the Sydney Opera House as well as leading Body Crysis, alongside NAXS Future, presented at the Substation in 2022. He was an invited artist at the Taipei Performing Art Centre's ADAM artist Lab and is a recipient of the Chloe Munro AO Fellowship. Harrison is also a founder of experimental digital arts studio PSEUDO.

Mat Spisbah is an artist and organiser focusing on digital and sound work. Spisbah has a long history within Australia’s DIY music communities, as well as commissioned performance works, exhibitions and projects across Australia and Asia. His artistic work traverses the overlapping terrain of his life, practice and output.