Meet the Reworlders
The Reworlders are a collective of Indigenous, people of colour, settler and LGBTIQA2S+ artists, scientists, thinkers and change-makers with a track record of collaboratively working at the intersections of art, the climate emergency leadership, speculative futures and disaster resilience. We are a group of bridge-builders and connectors with diverse and intersecting practices. Our growing body of critical work subverts conventional platforms for engagement in the climate emergency.
Dr Vicki Couzens (she/her)
Cultural Lead
Vicki is Gunditjmara from the Western Districts of Victoria. She acknowledges her ancestors and elders who guide her work. Dr Couzens has worked in Aboriginal community affairs for almost 40 years. Her contributions in the reclamation, regeneration and revitalisation of cultural knowledge and practice extend across the ‘arts and creative cultural expression’ spectrum including language revitalisation, ceremony, community arts, public art, visual and performing arts, and writing.
She is a Senior Knowledge Custodian for Possum Skin Cloak Story and Language Reclamation and Revival in her Keerray Woorroong Mother Tongue. Vicki is employed at RMIT as a Vice Chancellors Indigenous Research Fellow developing her Project ‘watnanda koong meerreeng , tyama-ngan malayeetoo (together body and country, we know long time)’ The key objective of this Project is to produce model/s, pathways and resources for continuing the reinvigoration of Aboriginal Ways of Knowing Being and Doing with a special focus on language revitalisation.
Claire G. Coleman (she/her)
Co-founder and Lead Writer
Claire is a Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia, she was born in Boorloo (Perth) and is currently based in Naarm. Her debut novel Terra Nullius [2017], published in Australia and in the US, won a Norma K. Hemming Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and an Aurealis Award. Her second novel is The Old Lie [2019], followed by Lies, Damn Lies [2021] unpacks the damages of colonisation, and her new book Enclave was released in July 2022.
Her essays, poetry, short fiction and art criticism has been published in the Saturday Paper, Guardian, Spectrum, Meanjin, Griffith Review and many others. Claire is currently working on a commissioned play for the Malthouse Theatre, and is the lead writer on Child of Now, an experimental site-specific extensible reality theatre project.
Dr Jen Rae (she/her, they/them)
Co-founder and Creative Research Lead
Co-Lead, Creative Resilience Lab
Jen is an award-winning artist-researcher of Canadian Métis*-Scottish descent, living and creating on Wurrundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Her practice-led research expertise is in the discursive field of contemporary environmental art and arts-based environmental communication. It is centered around cultural responses to climate change/emergency (a.k.a. ‘everything change’), specifically the role of artists. Her work is engaged in discourses around climate-related disaster risk reduction + resilience, speculative futures and intergenerational justice predominantly articulated through transdisciplinary collaborative methodologies, Indigenous pedagogies and community alliances.
Jen creates and contributes to experimental multi-platform collaborative projects, including being a core artist of Arts House’s prescient multi-year REFUGE project (2016-2022) - where artists, emergency service providers and communities work together to rehearse climate-related emergencies and explore the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness.
Jen is a Creative Australia Fellow for Emerging and Experimental Art (2023/24) and Australian National University’s H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow (2024). She was previously a board member of the Creative Recovery Network (2017-2023) and the International Environmental Communication Association (2019-2023), and currently is a member of the National Taskforce for Creative Recovery.
‘Everything change’ - originally coined by Margaret Atwood.
Angharad Wynne-Jones (she/her)
Creative Strategist
Angharad Wynne-Jones (she/her) is Cymry (Welsh) Australian and lives on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation in Narrm (Melbourne). She is currently Head of Audience Engagement at the State Library Victoria, leading a team to create large scale exhibitions, public programs and events that support community knowledge building. Previously she was Head of Creative Engagement at Arts Centre Melbourne (2017-2021), facilitating Alter State – a disability led performing arts festival alongside a host of large scale public and participative performance programs.
From 2011-2017 she was Artistic Director at Arts House, City of Melbourne, a contemporary arts production house where she initiated Refuge- a five year action research into the role of cultural institutions and communities in responding to the impacts of climate disasters. She was Founder Director of TippingPoint Australia (2010-2019) co-designed and delivered NIDA’s MFA Cultural Leadership course 2015-2018
Maree Grenfell (she/her)
Community and Resilience Strategist
Co-Lead, Creative Resilience Lab
Maree is an accomplished change strategist and thought leader with a track record of achievement across the community, private and government sectors. She has 20+ years’ experience in developing creative strategies and programs to help organisations improve their sustainability, reduce impact on climate change and build resilience to future challenges. Maree worked as Melbourne’s Deputy Chief Resilience Officer for six years (as part of the 100 Resilient Cities global program), creating and implementing Australia’s first urban resilience strategy (Resilient Melbourne) led by local government.
She works in various roles including Co-Manager City Resilience and Sustainable Futures for the City of Melbourne as well as her own consultancy, Once Upon Tomorrow. Her expertise is in designing, delivering, facilitating and successfully implementing innovative solutions with and for broad audiences. She is passionate about creating change and upholds strong personal integrity to do so; her goal is a community-centred future in which cities and human wellbeing are interdependent. In her spare time she “reworlds” in the garden and loves to weave plant fibres.
Naomi Velaphi (she/her)
Program Designer
Naomi is an independent producer born on Whadjuk Noongar country, residing in Naarm (Melbourne). She strives to nurture artists' work and practices exploring alternative narratives, radical thought and deep connection. Centered on producing the work of contemporary, diverse and interdisciplinary artists her experience spans working for and amongst galleries, festivals and performance spaces.
She has held producing roles for a number of arts institutions including Australian Performing Arts Market, Arts House, Arts Centre Melbourne, Abbotsford Convent and Koorie Heritage Trust. Her curatorial interests are derived through her experiences as a woman of African and Asian identities and the communities she represents. She holds a Masters of Arts and Cultural Management from the University of Melbourne, is a part of the Australia Council Arts Leadership Program and sits on the board of leading sound organisation Liquid Architecture.
Lauren Rickards (she/her)
Researcher
Professor Lauren Rickards is a human geographer and ecologist by training now working primarily on climate change futures and related questions about the urban-rural and human-nature relationship. With degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Melbourne, and experience in the private sector, Lauren conducts research on many of the social dimensions of climate change, particularly in the water and agri-food sectors and with collaborators in other disciplines and organisations.
Lauren advises a wide range of groups in government, business and the NGO sector on climate change issues and is a Lead Author with the Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change. At RMIT University, Lauren has been working with others to support critical and purposeful engagement with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and questions of research impact.
Kamarra Bell-Wykes (she/her)
Dramaturg
Kamarra is a descendent of the Yagera and Butchulla people of South-East Queensland. Recently appointed to the role of Creative Director at ILBIJERRI Theater Company, Kamarra has twenty years’ experience as a playwright as well as a Bachelor of Teaching and Learning. Her works include award winning health-education shows Chopped Liver, Body Armor and North West of Nowhere.
These plays were written specifically for prison, school and Aboriginal community audiences and combined have toured over eleven years and have been seen by more than 50,000 people across Australia. Over the last three years Kamarra has begun developing a First Nations approach to directing, devising and dramaturgy
Alex Kelly (she/her)
Evaluation & Impact Producer
Alex Kelly is an artist, filmmaker, producer and activist based on Dja Dja Wurrung land, ‘Australia’. Working across film, theatre, communications strategy and troublemaking, Alex purposefully connects the disciplines of art and social change. Producer of award-winning documentaries Island of the Hungry Ghosts and In My Blood it Runs, creative producer on Ngapartji Ngapartji, and Global Impact & Distribution Producer on Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.
Alex has been supported by a Churchill Fellowship, a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and a Bertha Challenge Fellowship. Alex’s current focus is the futuring practice The Things We Did Next, a hybrid of theatre, imagination and democracy [co-created with David Pledger from not yet it’s difficult].…
Devon Taylor (she/her, they/them)
Partnerships & Collaborations Producer
Devon is an independent producer born on unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory on Turtle Island and now living on Dja Dja Wurrung land in ‘Australia’. Her work is driven by a passion for creating social and political change through making art together. She has extensive experience working across all facets of live and interdisciplinary performance, including circus, physical theatre, theatre, live art and participatory practise.
From 2014-2022, Devon was Executive Director and then Co-CEO/ Creative Producer at feminist community arts organistion, Women’s Circus. Devon has sat on the National Circus and Physical Advisory Committee for Theatre Network Australia, the Arts West Alliance and the One Night in Footscray Committee. More recently, she has worked with Arts Centre Melbourne and was the Lead Producer for the Centre for Reworlding in 2022- supporting the collective to build their partnerships and organisational and brand strategies. Devon applies principles of intersectional feminism to her collaborative approach to realising new artworks and sees her role as a conduit for community creativity and storytelling.
Partners
The Centre for Reworlding recognises our partnerships:
