australianscreen curators
Lynden Barber
Feature film curator
Lynden Barber is a Sydney-based journalist specialising in film and music and an occasional film studies lecturer. He has been Artistic Director of the Sydney Film Festival, film writer for The Australian and senior film critic at The Sydney Morning Herald. Born in the UK, Barber moved to Australia in 1985. He is published most frequently in The Australian and Limelight magazine. His work has also been published in Melody Maker, NME and Australian Rolling Stone magazine.
Janet Bell
Television curator
Janet has been working in the Australian television industry as a producer, director and executive producer for 30 years. Her credits as producer include the AFI Award-winning Land of the Morning Star, the original series of Dynasties for ABC TV, In the Mind of the Architect and the Dendy Awards finalist Seasons of Revenge. Her latest project is as co-producer on the documentary In Search of Bony.
Paul Byrnes
Feature film curator
Paul has been a film critic for The Sydney Morning Herald for 15 years. He was director of the Sydney Film Festival for ten years, and has programmed exhibitions of Australian cinema for venues in Berlin and New York. His educational DVD looking at the politics and propaganda of immigration film, co-written and directed with Penny McDonald, won the 2005 Focal International award for best use of archive footage in a digital medium. Paul recently won the 2007 Pascall Prize for Critic of the Year.
Poppy de Souza
National Film and Sound Archive curator, documentary curator
Poppy has worked with a diverse range of community groups as a digital storytelling facilitator at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre in Canberra and ACMI in Melbourne. She has also worked with national community arts organisation big hArt as a video editor for a commercial production company in Sydney; and more recently developed a framework for Non-Governmental Organisations in the Maldives to use arts and culture for civil society strengthening.
Pat Fiske
Documentary curator
Pat Fiske is a director, producer and sound recordist and a prominent member of Australia’s independent filmmaking community. Her two-part series about private prisons in Australia and the United States, Business Behind Bars, won a 2001 Walkley Award. In 2001, she was awarded the prestigious Stanley Hawes Award for her outstanding contribution to the documentary industry. Her films include the award-winning documentaries Doc (1995), a portrait of Herbert Vere Evatt; For All the World to See (1992), a portrait of Professor Fred Hollows; and Rocking the Foundations (1986), a history of the NSW Builders’ Labourers Federation.
Jenny Fraser
Indigenous curator
Jenny is interested in the art of curating as an act of sovereignty and emancipation. She founded the cyberTribe online gallery in 1999 and the Blackout Collective in 2002, was coordinator for the new media arts component of the 'Spirit and Vision’ Triennial in Vienna, and also part of the curatorial working group for 'conVerge: Where Art and Science Meet’ at the 2002 Adelaide Biennale. She was the first Aboriginal Curator to present a Triennial exhibition in Australia, 'The Other APT’, a response to the Asia-Pacific Triennial. Her work has screened at ISEA 2006 in San Jose and the InteractivA Biennales in Mexico, and she received an honourable mention at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto.
Sandy George
Feature film curator
Journalist Sandy George has been Australian correspondent for the London-based magazine Screen International and its online newsfeed since the early 1990s. Her particular interest is the business of Australian film and television production. She contributes to a range of publications, provides newsletters to several industry organisations, and is a former film writer for The Australian newspaper.
Richard Kuipers
Feature film curator, Chronology editor
Richard is a film critic for the international trade paper Variety. He also contributes movie reviews and commentary on ABC Radio National and the webzine Urban Cinefile. Richard has produced and directed several documentaries including Stone Forever (1999), a look at one of Australia’s most famous cult films. He produced the national television program The Movie Show on SBS Television from 1992-2000.
Susan Lambert
Documentary, Experimental and Shorts curator
Susan Lambert is one of Australia’s leading filmmakers with work produced, broadcast and distributed internationally. Her early work as an independent feminist filmmaker was recognised with the 1984 AFC Documentary Fellowship which resulted in the experimental feature Landslides (1986). Her work includes the feature Talk (1994); the international documentaries Tokyo Bound: Bondage Mistresses of Japan (2001), Deadly Enemies (2005), The Good, the Bad and the Ugg Boot (2006) and The Cars That Ate China (2008); and TV series including Under the Hammer (1997), Risky Business (1999), DIY Law (2001), Love and Money (2004) and On Trial (2009). She also teaches at AFTRS.
Anne Lucas
Television curator
Anne Lucas has been involved with the Australian entertainment industry for over 40 years, starting as an actress. After leading roles in several iconic Australian television dramas, she moved into script editing and screenwriting. She has script credits on over 400 hours of Australian television covering serials, adult drama series, telemovies, children’s drama and mini-series. She is a multiple Australian Writers Guild 'AWGIE’ Award nominee and wrote the dual AFI Award winning episode of Embassy (1990-92), 'A Human Dimension’.
Kate Matthews
Television curator
Kate’s work in screen has spanned writing, lecturing, project facilitation and animation. Her short films have screened internationally and allowed her to travel to the Edinburgh and Berlin International Film Festivals. She has been a Short Animation Selection Panellist for the Melbourne International Film Festival (2005-2008), taught at the School of Creative Media at RMIT University (since 2004) and worked for ACMI since 2006 as a Coordinator and Facilitator of screen workshops and events, including digital storytelling and children’s animation. Her writing has appeared in Metro, Screen Education and Senses of Cinema.
Liz McNiven
National Film and Sound Archive, Senior Curator Indigenous Collections
Liz is a Barnba woman from the Budjiti nation of Paroo river country in north-west NSW and south-west Queensland. She completed a comprehensive skills development program at AIATSIS in the early 1990s, complemented by a BA in Communications and Media at the University of Canberra. Over the past ten years, Liz has worked at the National Gallery of Australia, Museum Victoria, the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. Liz is now the Acting Senior Curator of the NFSA Indigenous Collections and Manager of the NFSA Indigenous Collections Branch.
Romaine Moreton
Indigenous curator
Dr Romaine Moreton is a writer of poetry, prose and film with a PhD in philosophy from the University of Western Sydney. Romaine Moreton published her first book of poetry, The Callused Stick of Wanting in 1996, and her second anthology, titled Post Me to the Prime Minister and published by IAD Press, was launched at the Sydney Writer’s Festival in 2004. Romaine has also scripted films, and her first two Redreaming the Dark, and Cherish were selected for the fringe program at the Cannes Film Festival. A third film, A Walk With Words, based on Romaine’s poetry and experience, won the award for Best International Short Film, at the World of Women Film Festival.
Annemaree O'Brien
Children's television curator
Annemaree O’Brien has an extensive background in literacy and media education as a teacher, lecturer, consultant, writer, project manager and researcher. She is currently undertaking a PhD in multimodal literacy through the University of New England working on a research project based at the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Previously, Annemaree was responsible for developing and implementing screen literacy and production programs for teachers and students at ACMI. Prior to ACMI, she was the Education Projects Manager for the ACTF. She is also involved in developing multimedia education projects, designing and scripting online learning objects for The Le@rning Federation.
Damien Parer
Documentary curator
Damien is an independent film and TV producer. He was a film editor, art director and production manager on various independent films, before becoming in-house producer at the Tasmanian Film Corporation and Film Australia. He was then Head of Production for Barron Entertainment and the Film Development Manager for the South Australian Film Corporation. He has produced six feature films and two mini-series. His award-winning films include Shame, Father and Tracks of Glory.
Adrienne Parr
National Archives of Australia curator, documentary curator
Adrienne is an award-winning documentary producer who has specialised in the incorporation of archival material in educational and contemporary programming. Adrienne’s experience with moving image research began over 20 years ago when she was offered the job of assisting Graham Shirley with film research for the mini-series The Dismissal. Her list of credits includes: as producer, The Forgotten Force, Teachers of the World, Family, and AsiaScope; and, as Archival Researcher, Camera Natura, Handmaidens and Battleaxes, Uluru, An Anangu Story and Women 88.
Marian Quigley
Animation curator
Dr Marian Quigley is a freelance writer, researcher and editor; an Adjunct Research Fellow at Monash University and a member of the advisory panel for The Story of the Moving Image Exhibition at ACMI in Melbourne. A former lecturer in English, Media and Communications, her articles on animation have appeared in national and international publications. Marian’s book, Women Do Animate: Interviews with Ten Australian Animators (2005, Insight Publications), focused on the work of Australian women independent animators. She is also a founding member of Ibis Writers at Bass Coast, Victoria.
Sophia Sambono
National Film and Sound Archive, Curator Indigenous Collections
Sophia is a Jingili woman from the Northern Territory and a current curator of the Indigenous Collections at the National Film and Sound Archive. She works primarily on 'repatriation’ and engagement projects as well as Indigenous intellectual property rights and collection policy for the Indigenous Collections Branch at the NFSA.
Antoinette Starkiewicz
Animation curator
Antoinette is an animation director, both auteur and commercial, and represents Australian animators on the Board of the Australian Directors’ Guild. Her credits include Puttin’ on the Ritz (1974), Pussy Pumps Up (1979) and Pianoforte (1984). High Fidelity (1976) and Zipper (1998) were both in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. As a reviewer, she has contributed to Cinema Papers, Screen International and Digital Media World. Antoinette has collaborated with the FIPRESCI Jury at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, contributed to Cartoons: 100 Years of Cinema Animation (1994) and has been Animation Juror for the AFI Awards and the Sydney Film Festival.
Elizabeth Taggart-Speers
National Film and Sound Archive curator
Liz joined the National Film and Sound Archive in 2000 and worked across the organisation from Preservation to Access. Before leaving the NFSA in 2006, she provided material from the collection for documentaries, exhibitions and publications. She also provided audiovisual material to the The Le@rning Federation for their online resource for schools.
