Living and working on the land of the Gadigal people (Sydney, Australia) Samia Sayed is a contemporary artist, writer and producer whose practice embodies text through performance, interrogating and revising notions of religion, culture, and gender. Using poetry and her big, fat, strong body, she disrupts traditional storytelling structures and challenges spatial dynamics between performer and audience.

In 2025, Sayed was awarded the Parramatta Artists’ Studios Creative Fellowship and received an Arts Projects for Individuals and Groups grant from Creative Australia. She is also the recipient of the inaugural Performance Space Experimental Fellowship (2024) and participated in the (re)situate Biennale program (2024).

She has presented work at major institutions including the Art Gallery of New South Wales for Monumental (Working Title) (2023), The Alex for The Front Room (2023), and Carriageworks for FEAST (2022). Her work has featured in exhibitions such as Softcore (2023, Carriageworks), CHAMPS (2023, Granville Arts Centre), Last dance with you, Samia (2022, West Space Offsite), a heavy weight stitched (2022, Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize, Campbelltown Arts Centre), and Sports Show (2020, PARI).

Beyond institutional presentations, Sayed has undertaken text-based performance residencies at Campbelltown Arts Centre (2023), Artspace (2022), and Firstdraft (2021). Her performances have featured in public programs including Day for Night (2023, Carriageworks), All Ears: A Listening Party (2023, Campbelltown Arts Centre), and Studio Stories(2022, Parramatta Artists’ Studios).

Rooted in experimentation, improvisation, and critical inquiry, her practice continues to challenge perceptions, invite dialogue, and propose new ways of experiencing text and body in space.

Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer whose novel All Fours was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, the Women's Prize, and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and was named one of TIME's "100 Most Influential People of 2025." Her other books include The First Bad Man and No One Belongs Here More Than You, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

July wrote, directed, and starred in Me and You and Everyone We Know (Camera d'Or, Cannes; Special Jury Prize, Sundance) and The Future, and most recently directed Kajillionaire (2020). Her art works include Learning to Love You More (with Harrell Fletcher, now in SFMOMA's collection), the Venice Biennale sculpture garden Eleven Heavy Things, and the messaging app Somebody. In 2024, Fondazione Prada Osservatorio in Milan presented her first solo show, curated by Mia Locks. Raised in Berkeley, she lives in Los Angeles.

Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) was a pioneering American filmmaker whose groundbreaking work over four decades helped define lesbian and feminist experimental cinema. Born in Hollywood and trained at UCLA, she made her first film in the early 1970s after coming out as a lesbian at 30, going on to create more than 100 films exploring female sexuality, queer identity, and the body.

Her landmark feature Nitrate Kisses (1992) was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and won the Polar Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Even after an ovarian cancer diagnosis in 2006, Hammer remained prolific, producing seven more films, publishing a memoir, and mounting retrospectives at MoMA, Tate Modern, the Jeu de Paume, and the Hammer Museum. Her final work, Evidentiary Bodies, premiered posthumously at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2019.

Hammer's work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She also established two ongoing awards supporting queer experimental filmmakers.

Garden Reflexxx is the creative studio of artists Jen Atherton and André Shannon. Dubbed Australia’s “picture provocateurs” (The Guardian), their practice spans film, video, and expanded cinema, operating across production, collaboration, and curation.

They co-host the ongoing radio program Movies, Movies, Movies on FBi 94.5, and have appeared as critics across broadcast and print, including ABC’s The Mix, Berlin Critics’ Week, Flickerfest, and The Guardian.

Their sold-out debut book Eyes Wide Open was published by No More Poetry in 2025.

Over the past decade, Claudia Nicholson’s multidisciplinary practice has examined her relationship to Colombia and, more broadly, the Latin American region, in an ongoing negotiation of geographic, cultural, and temporal distance. These interests constitute a material exploration of kinship, memory and the struggle against forgetting– in both conscious and unconscious terms. The context for her politics of memory is the geographic and psychic slippage of living in the settler colony of Australia, having been adopted from Colombia. She examines the possibilities of reconstituting myself in Australia through material exploration of photography, painting, installation, performance and video.

In her recent exhibition, 'If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn', Nicholson drew from her archive of over two hundred photographs of Colombia and her life in Australia to develop a new body of photographic work. This is part of an ongoing practice of re-examining and deconstructing her personal archive anew. In the developing process of analogue photography, the image appears slowly and can rapidly disappear again through overexposure. The varied yet rhythmic nature of her photographs reflect her interest in the workings of memory. Focused on an attempt to catch the image, her artwork obscures and fractures the image further.

EO Gill (b. 1986) is a moving-image artist and curator. Gill’s work explores how gender is produced and represented in cinema historically. Most recently, Gill has presented works at Sydney Film Festival, SYRUP Contemporary and Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. Gill was born and raised on Ngunnawal Country, Canberra and lives on Gadigal land in Sydney. They are currently an artist-in-residence at Artspace.