CONTENT COURTESY SYDNEY MYER CREATIVE FELLOWSHIPS
The Sidney Myer Creative Fellowships recognise the talent and exceptional courage of artists. This year, they have been awarded to nine extraordinary artists from across Australia in dance, performance, visual arts, writing, theatre and music.
They are: Alison Murphy-Oates (NSW), cultural leadership; Ellen van Neerven (Qld), literature; Eric Avery (NSW), music/dance (pictured above); Hoda Afshar (Vic), photography; Jo Lloyd (Vic), dance, Joel Ma (Vic), music, multi-artform; Latai Taumoepeau (NSW), performance art; Michele Lee (Vic), theatre writing; Tjungkara Ken (SA), painting.
Each fellow is awarded a generous unrestricted tax-free grant of $160,000 over a two-year period. Since 2011, the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowships have awarded over $14.5 million to 91 artists. This uniquely places the fellows and their artistic endeavours at the centre of the fellowships.
The Sidney Myer Creative Fellowships recognise talent and exceptional courage in mid-career artists. Unfettered in their artistic excellence, each Sidney Myer Creative Fellow has shown a passionate commitment to their practice and an unyielding belief in how the arts can make a positive contribution to community.
‘’I am delighted to make this year’s announcement and extend my congratulations to these wonderful artists. It’s been a testing time for so many of us, and our arts community has suffered significantly with so many performances, exhibitions and theatres closed. It is my hope that this support will make a meaningful difference to support those that help us make sense of this world,’’ says Andrew Myer AM, Chair, National Peer Review Panel for the 2021 Fellows.
The fellowships are not tied to any specific outcome, instead, they provide an income over a two-year period, allowing each fellow time to reflect and develop aspects of their creative practice without financial pressure. This uniquely places the Fellows and their artistic endeavours at the centre of the fellowships.
‘’Receiving the fellowship is a huge recognition for me from the arts community,’’ says writer Ellen van Neerven. ‘’I feel very grateful. My life has changed because of this opportunity. With this support I can work and think in the long-term rather than short-term, and put my creative practice at the forefront of my output. I find it difficult to juggle immersive writing projects with the freelance work required to keep myself financially afloat. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to write for two years. I am humbled to be part of a community of current and previous fellows.’’
For photographer, Hoda Afshar: ‘’I am incredibly honoured and grateful to receive this significant fellowship and recognition. It is an acknowledgment of the courage and effort that I have often had to show in order to make the work that I do. I feel both humbled and truly overwhelmed. This fellowship provides me both the opportunity to take on even more ambitious projects for the next few years, as well as the encouragement to do so with renewed effort.”
“It is also a great honour to be placed in such distinguished ranks as those of the past recipients – many of whom have been great inspirations to me at one time or another, and all of whom have made important contributions to the arts, culture and life of Australia. Again, I am deeply honoured by this recognition and looking forward to the new possibilities that lie ahead.’’
The national Peer Review Panel for the 2021 Fellows included: Andrew Myer AM (Chair), Amos Gebhardt, Helen Marcou AM, Jeff Khan, Jo Dyer, Josh Wright and Tarun Nagesh.
To be nominated for a fellowship, artists and thought leaders must be within seven and 15 years into their creative practice and meet two criteria: outstanding talent and exceptional professional courage. They are open to artists and arts managers across the entire spectrum of the visual, performing, interdisciplinary, new media and literary arts.
The fellowship program is one of the many initiatives of the Sidney Myer Fund that support and enrich the cultural life of Australia.
2021 Sidney Myer Creative Fellows
Alison Murphy-Oates
Alison (Ali) Murphy-Oates is a Ngiyampaa Wailwan woman (Central-West New South Wales) who has dedicated herself to supporting the development and empowerment of First Peoples Artists and Arts Workers, and the growth of a network of First Peoples practitioners globally. Ali is Managing Director at Moogahlin Performing Arts and a freelance producer, arts administrator, and consultant, focusing specifically on supporting First Peoples artists and sector. Establishing the first Indigenous-led performing arts centre and finding the appropriate people to join the team, is her next professional move. This is important work because Australia does not yet have a dedicated First People’s owned and controlled performing arts venue.
Ellen van Neerven
Ellen van Neerven (they/them) was born in Brisbane in 1990 and is an award-winning author, editor and educator of Mununjali (Yugambeh language group) and Dutch heritage. Ellen is one of the outstanding young writers of their generation – truly an artist in full stride. In 2014, they burst onto the literary scene with a collection of stories, Heat and Light. This book is one of the most-awarded Australian debuts ever, winning the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing and an SMH Best Young Novelist Award, and shortlisted for many other awards. Ellen’s poetry collection Comfort Food (UQP, 2016) won the Tina Kane Emergent Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize. Throat (UQP, 2020), another poetry collection, received the inaugural Quentin Bryce Award. With three exciting projects in development, Ellen continues to work across poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
Eric Avery
Eric Avery is a Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bandjalang and Gumbangirr artist renowned for being a classically trained violinist and composer, as well as a professional dancer. As a dancer, he works regularly with Marrugeku. As a violinist, he has worked with everyone from Black Arm Band to Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to Tina Arena. Eric is as steeped in the Western classical traditions of the violin as he is in his ancestral cultural heritage; synthesising the two in his artistic practice is a hallmark of his work. Eric is passionate about the continuity of his culture through the arts. He teaches dance and music to Indigenous youth and is developing original compositions for various ensembles. He is also collaborating with a wealth of artists from around the globe, including Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, North American First Nations composers, African American jazz violinist Regina Carter, and Grammy-winner Rhiannon Giddens.
Hoda Afshar
Hoda Afshar is an Iranian-Australian visual artist, born in Tehran in 1983 and now based in Melbourne. Her visual practice spans photography and moving image and is focused on exploring specific social and political issues related to marginality, visibility and displacement. Hoda’s processes of making are time intensive. She often spends years conducting research, working ethically with her subjects be they contemporary people or historical images from the archive. She also works collaboratively with people she is photographing, ensuring their voice leads their story. Hoda’s series Remain (2018), in which she shows the lives and experiences of several men who remained on Manus Island after seeking asylum in Australia, included a portrait of Behrouz Boochani, which won the prestigious Bowness Photography Prize. She recently won the Ramsay Art Prize People’s Choice award for her 3D renderings of contemporary Australian whistle-blowers. Hoda is one of the country’s leading contemporary visual artists and an important voice in Australia’s human rights conversations.
Jo Lloyd
Jo Lloyd is one of Australia’s most outstanding female dance artists. As a highly respected independent Melbourne-based choreographer, performer and teacher, Jo has developed a distinctive voice – her nominator Lucy Guerin describes her as having “enormous vitality and fearless curiosity.” She explores unique movement vocabularies with humour, imagination and risk, and is a captivating performer with a powerful presence. With an extensive international career as a dancer and teacher, the excitement around her choreography has escalated in recent years, thanks to her multi-award-winning OVERTURE (2018). Jo works with a small team of collaborators outside of the typical dance company model, and this independence and flexibility of practice is an important trail to blaze as Australia’s contemporary dance sector matures.
Joel Ma
Joel Ma founded seminal Australian rap group TZU in the early 2000s, building a reputation around electric live performances and inventiveness in the studio across four albums, picking up nominations for the Australian Music Prize, a J Award and an APRA Award. Under the moniker Joelistics, he continued his success as a music performer and producer, which has extended into co-writing and producing credits with acts like Haiku Hands and Mo’Ju. But his artistic excellence extends further, with a theatre writing credit for In Between Two (2015) which toured nationally and is currently in development as a TV series with producer Tony Ayres and writer Nam Le. Joel has also done significant work behind the scenes as a mentor, facilitator and change agent through roles with Multicultural Arts Victoria, various music industry boards, and through his own studio and label. Through both his music and his leadership, Joel is reshaping the Australian music industry by challenging stereotypes and forging new collaborations.
Latai Taumoepeau
Latai Taumoepeau is a body-centred performance artist. Her work has been described as sitting between dance and visual art. She describes her work as belonging to the Tongan form of performance called faiva, which translates as marking/doing time and space. In Tongan culture, ‘Punake’ is a term used to describe artists who compose poetry and songs and choreograph them for performance. Latai is a contemporary Punake. Working in durational performance and documenting it through photographs, she addresses issues of race, class and the female body. In her recent practice, she explores the effects of climate change in the Pacific, probing existing power structures and the looming possibility of dispossession that many island communities face.
Michele Lee
Michele Lee is an Asian-Australian writer working across theatre, live art, audio and screen. Her works explore otherness, identity and found families, usually through contemporary narratives that privilege the experiences of women and people of colour. When she started practising as a playwright 12 years ago, there were far fewer practicing Asian Australian playwrights. She has been in the vanguard of change on that front, working with companies such as Sydney Theatre Company, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre, Griffin Theatre, Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre; with youth theatres such as Platform Youth Theatre and St Martins Youth Theatre; with festivals; with ABC Radio and TV; and with universities such as Monash University and University of Melbourne. She recently received her first development funding from Screen Australia for her original TV comedy concept, Next Big Thing, in which a young Asian-Australian theatre director must navigate a new job in an elite theatre company while being unexpectedly pregnant.
Tjungkara Ken
Tjungkara Ken was born in Amata, South Australia, in 1969. She is a Pitjantjatjara painter based on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in far north-west South Australia. She is regarded as a master colourist and is renowned for her use of deep colours, subtle colour shifts and meticulous style in illustrating the elements of her Country and the Tjukurpa (culture, dreaming, law), predominantly the Seven Sisters story. She is part of the Ken Sisters Collaborative who were awarded the Wynne Prize in 2016 and she was a finalist in the 2017 Archibald Prize. She has exhibited widely throughout Australia and her work is represented in collections including Artbank, Art Gallery of South Australia, National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, QAGOMA, and has recently been exhibited in the US, Hong Kong, and France. As a mentor to young men and women and emerging artists on the APY Lands, Tjungkara holds a respected position as a regional leader and advocate.
