Dr Jen Rae (she/they) is an award-winning artist and researcher of Canadian Scottish-Métis (Indigenous) descent living on unceded Djaara Country (Castlemaine) Australia. She is recognised for her practice and expertise situated at the intersections of art, speculative futures and climate emergency disaster adaptation + resilience – predominantly articulated through transdisciplinary collaborations, multi-platform projects, community alliances and public pedagogies. Most noteworthy was her role as a core artist of Arts House’s prescient REFUGE project (2016-2022) - where artists, emergency service providers and communities worked together to rehearse climate-related emergencies exploring the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness.

In 2022, Jen co-designed and co-facilitated the City of Melbourne’s emergency drill exercise and was a keynote speaker at the 2022 National Summit: From Risk to Resilience – an event informing the national framework on disaster risk reduction and resilience. She is a Co-founder and the Creative Research Lead at the Centre for Reworlding, a member of the National Task Force for Creative Recovery, and was awarded a prestigious 2023 Creative Australia Fellowship for Emerging and Experimental Art. In 2024, Jen was awarded Australian National University’s H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship and the 2024/25 University of Wisconsin’s International Visiting Artist Residency. www.jenraeis.com

Photo: Penny Ryan Photography