Maree is a creative strategist with 25+ years of experience working on the big issues; sustainability, climate change, inclusive communities and urban resilience. She is a respected thought leader in all things resilience, climate change and behaviour change and is passionate about joining dots between people and knowledge - amplifying outcomes for lasting change.

A dynamic and optimistic facilitator, Maree ignites transformational ideas, fosters collaboration and creates safe spaces for meaningful engagement.

For many years Maree worked as a intrapreneur creating cultural shifts within city and regional local governments, not for profit and private sectors.

For six years Maree was Melbourne’s Deputy Chief Resilience Officer (as part of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities program) creating and implementing the Resilient Melbourne strategy with 32 local councils while developing and delivering capacity building programs. Following this Maree co-Managed the City of Melbourne’s City Resilience and Sustainable Futures team inspiring ambition and creativity on complex city challenges.

Maree is the founder of Once Upon Tomorrow where she works with communities on hazard agnostic strategies to future challenges - building connection, social justice and social capital. Maree's passion projects involve regenerating native landscapes, making and weaving.

Maree met most of the Reworlders while involved with Arts House's Refuge program which resulted in the creation of the Creative Resilience Lab, first held in Vancouver in 2019.

Dr Jen Rae 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

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