Barbara Bolt is a Professorial Fellow at The Victorian College of the Arts at The University of Melbourne. She is a practising artist and art theorist. Her research addresses the dialogue between theory and practice and between digital and analogue painting seen through the lens of New Materialisms. Her publications include two monographs Art Beyond Representation (2004) and Heidegger Reframed (2011) and five co-edited books including Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts(2007), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts (2013) and Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research (2014) with Estelle Barrett. Barbara has been a finalist in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, The Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, the Swan Hill Print and Drawing Prize and the Alice Prize. Her works are held in collections including Artbank, the University of Western Australia, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University and Murdoch University.

Associate Professor Andrew Lavery is Co-Director and Co-Chair of Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) and Dean’s Fellow for Academic Excellence. His previous roles include Deputy Dean and Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching at SCA.

As inaugural Director and Chair of SCA (2017–2021), Andrew led SCA’s transformation from a faculty at Rozelle into a thriving department on the Camperdown Campus, shaping its vision, public profile and culture while driving performance across teaching, research, and engagement.

Andrew’s artistic practice spans three decades, with works exhibited nationally and internationally and held in public and private collections. Through a historical materialist framework, his works interpret urban decay — past, present, and future — as a critique of progress in late capitalist society. 

Andrew is a co-opted board member of the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts.

Jaime Tsai is Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the National Art School, Sydney and an independent curator of contemporary Australian art. Her current research explores how the strategies of Dada and Surrealism have been adapted and expanded by contemporary Australian artists. She has contributed to the Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Visual Culture(forthcoming 2027), the International Encyclopedia of Surrealism (2019) and her publications include “Surrealism, Counter-Mapping and COVID: Confluences in Contemporary Asian Australian Art” (with Victoria Carruthers) in the International Journal of Surrealism 1, no. 2 (Spring 2024), “The Subterranean Modernism of Bataille and Duchamp,” in Duchamp Accelerated (2024), “Pixel Pirates: Theft as Strategy in the Art of Joan Ross and Soda Jerk,” in Dada Data: Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics (2023) and “Equivocal Taxonomies: Fiona Hall and the Logic of Display” in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (2016). 

Sara Oscar is a photographic artist, writer and academic. Her creative research considers the impact of visual technologies in shaping conceptions of self and other, often playing upon photographic ways of seeing that shape what is classified, remembered and forgotten in image collections. Her scholarly research considers the epistemic, cultural and ontological impacts of AI-generated technology as part of a broader historical framework of photography. She has written for Photographies, Digital Creativity, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Philosophy of Photography and The Conversation. She recently co-edited the 2026 special issue of Photographies, Photography and Memory in the Age of AI. Her creative work has been exhibited extensively in Australia. Recent exhibitions include The Mute and Counterfactual Departures at Annandale Galleries (2026); A Gestural Drift at Artbank (2025); Execute_Photography at RMIT Galleries, curated by Daniel Palmer, Katrina Sluis, Alison Bennett and Shane Hulbert (2024); PHOTO 2021: International Festival of Photography, Melbourne (2021); and the National Photography Prize, MAMA Albury (2022). Her work is held in national collections, including the AGNSW and Artbank. She holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication at the University of Technology Sydney.

Diana Baker Smith is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at UNSW Sydney. Her projects have been presented nationally at institutions including the Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, La Trobe Art Institute, and the Biennale of Sydney. Internationally her work has been presented at Te Uru, Auckland, The Physics Room, Christchurch, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, and Hayward Gallery, London. In 2024 she received the Judy Wheeler Commission from Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and in 2025 was awarded the Major Acquisitive Gosford Art Prize. She is currently artist-in-residence at Vaucluse House, Museums of History NSW.