Prof Ted Snell AM, chair, WA

Professor Ted Snell AM was appointed chair of the visual arts board and a member of Council in 2006. In 2009 Ted was appointed as Director of the Cultural Precinct at the University of Western Australia. Prior to that he was Professor of Contemporary Art, and Dean of Art at the John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology, Perth.

He has made a significant contribution to the Australian visual arts sector through his roles as Chair of Artbank, chair of the Asialink Visual Arts Advisory Committee, chair of the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools and as a board member of the National Association for the Visual Arts. Ted has curated many exhibitions and has published several books and catalogues. He has twice been shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier's Book Award. Currently he is the Perth art reviewer for The Australian and has been a commentator on the arts for ABC radio and television.

A practising visual artist since 1968, his work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane, and in group exhibitions throughout Australia. Ted's work is represented in many public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank and the Art Gallery of Western Australia as well as in private collections in Australia and overseas.

Dr Victoria Reichelt, QLD

Victoria Reichelt is a Queensland based visual artist. She studied Fine Art at the Queensland College of Art, graduating in 2005 having completed her Doctor of Visual Arts. She has been short-listed for a number of major art prizes including the Sulman Art Prize, Fletcher Jones Art Prize, RBS Emerging Artist Award and the Stan and Maureen Duke Art Prize.
 
She has been awarded the Linden Innovators Award and the people’s choice prizes in both the RBS Emerging Artist Award and the Metro Art Award. Her work has been included in the exhibitions, ‘Covered’ at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, ‘The Red Exhibition’ at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and ‘Contemporary Australia: Optimism’ at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. In 2007 she received a New Work grant from the Visual Arts Board to paint a series of Australian artists' book collections.

Victoria’s work has been collected by Artbank, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Gold Coast City Art Gallery as well as a number of national and international private collections.

Assoc. Prof Mari Velonaki, NSW

Mari Velonaki has worked as an artist and researcher in the field of interactive installation art since 1995. Mari has created interactive installations that incorporate movement, speech, touch, breath, electrostatic charge, artificial vision and robotics. In 2003, Mari's practice expanded to robotics, when she initiated and led a major Australian Research Council art/science research project 'Fish-Bird: Autonomous Interactions in a Contemporary Arts Setting' in collaboration whith robotics scientists at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics.

In 2006 she co-founded, with David Rye, the Centre for Social Robotics, a centre dedicated to interdisciplinary research into human-robot interaction in spaces that incorporate the general public. In 2007 Mari was awarded an Australia Council  for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship and in 2009 she was awarded an ARC Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship.

Mari is an Associate Professor and the director of the recently established Creative Robotics Lab, at the National Institute of Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales. The Lab will officially open to interdisciplinary researchers in 2013.

Mari's artworks have been exhibited worldwide, including: National Art Museum Beijing, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea; ZENDAI Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh; Millenium Museum - Beijing Biennale of Electronic Arts; Ars Electronica, Linz; Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art; Conde Duque Museum, Madrid; and European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück.

Catherine Truman, SA

Catherine Truman is an established contemporary jeweller and object-maker working across the disciplines of art and science. She is co-founder and current  partner of Gray Street Workshop - an internationally renowned artist-run workshop established in 1985 in Adelaide. In 1990 she was awarded the Japan/South Australia Cultural Exchange Scholarship and studied with contemporary Netsuke carvers in Tokyo. In 1998 she was a finalist in the Seppelt's Contemporary Art Award at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and was awarded an Australia Council Visual Arts Fellowship in 2006.

Current interests lie in the ways in which human anatomy has been translated through artistic process and scientific method. Since 2009 she has been the artist in residence at the Autonomic Neurotransmission Laboratory, Anatomy and Histology, Flinders University, Adelaide. In 2011 she was awarded an ANAT Synapse Residency to continue the development of a research project based at Flinders University.

Truman has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her works are represented in a number of major collections including: Artbank, the Pinakothek Moderne, Munich; Coda-museum, Netherlands; Museum of Auckland, New Zealand; National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; Queensland Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Seán Kelly, TAS

Seán Kelly is a writer, curator, arts consultant and arts administrator based in Hobart, Tasmania. He has worked within the arts for over 30 years, in a wide range of areas including: teaching at HSC and university levels; Program Officer at Arts Tasmania; Director of Contemporary Art Services Tasmania; Program Manager and Curator at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork, Ireland; and General Manager of Kickstart Arts.

Seán has worked as a community writer and photographer at the Brighton Council and has organised seminars and discussions in contemporary modes of community-based arts practice. He managed the National Sculpture Factory's program of socially engaged arts projects for Cork Capital of Culture 2005 and was a member of the international curatorium for Cork Caucus. He also produced and edited the publication Cork Caucus: On Art, Democracy and Possibility in 2006.

He initiated and was editor of the journal Contemporary Art Tasmania. He has written a monograph on artist Raymond Arnold. He has written numerous catalogue essays, articles and regularly contributes reviews and articles for journals such as Circa (Ireland), Art Monthly, Art and Text, Artlink and Photofile.

Seán is currently the Arts Officer at the Moonah Arts Centre and the curator of Kelly's Garden Curated Projects (Salamanca Arts Centre).  

Dr Kate Daw, VIC

Melbourne based artist Kate Daw has degrees from the VCA, Glasgow School of Art, RMIT University and most recently has completed her PhD at the Faculty of the VCA and Music, University of Melbourne. She has most recently participated in exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Sarah Scout, The Melbourne Art Fair, the National Gallery of Victoria and in 2006 held a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, titled The Between Space.

Kate has received many awards and grants, including the esteemed Samstag Scholarship. She has undertaken a residency at the Asialink studio in India, and has exhibited her work widely, both nationally and internationally. She is interested in involving other people in her art practice, and works with Stewart Russell on large-scale public art projects.

Kate currently lectures at the School of Fine Art at the Faculty of the VCA and Music, and co-curated Bird Girls (2007) and Cock and Bull (2009) with Vicki McInnes, both of which were exhibited at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery. She has also taught at the Glasgow School of Art and at RMIT University. Kate was Chair of the Creation Panel (New Work) at Arts Victoria from 2007-2009. She is a recipient of a 2008 State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship and completed the inaugural Basil Sellers Fellowship at the MCG in 2009/10 with Stewart Russell.

Kate Daw is represented by Sarah Scout, Melbourne.

Dr Angela Valamanesh, SA 

Angela is an Adelaide based visual artist of reputation and considerable sensibility. Her work is minimal and organic and alludes to the space between form and function and art and science.

Angela Valamanesh has a MA Visual Arts from the University of South Australia. In 1996 she received an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts scholarship where she completed a MFA Program at the Glasgow School of Art. Angela recently completed a PhD Research Degree at the University of South Australia.

Angela has won many awards including the South Australian Ceramic Award in 2007 and La Trobe University Merit Award as part of the Sidney Myer Ceramics Exhibition Award in 2008. In 2000 she was artist in residence at the Jam Factory Ceramics Studio in Adelaide and in 2006 at the Canberra School of Art. Angela has received four grants from the Australia Council Visual Arts Board, most recently a New Work grant to create and exhibit a new body of ceramic works for an exhibition at the Jam Factory. 

Having exhibited widely throughout Australia, Asia, Europe and the USA Angela’s has recent exhibition All Creatures: works from Natural history collection, was presented in Adelaide at Greenaway Art Gallery in 2009. She was also part of the Bravura 21st Century Australian Craft exhibition held at Art Gallery of South Australia in 2010. 

Angela’s work has been collected by numerous private collections in Australia, Japan and the USA as well as being represented in many public collections. Some of them include the Art Gallery South Australia, Artbank, Westpac and Macquarie Banks, La Trobe University, the University of South Australia, University of Adelaide and the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre in Japan. Angela has recently had the monograph About being here published by Wakefield Press.

Dr Danie Mellor, NSW

Danie Mellor was born in Mackay, Queensland. His work utilises a broad range of media including drawing, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture and installation. It addresses the complex histories of Australia's Indigenous, Colonial and Settler communities.

Danie is currently lecturing in Theoretical Enquiry at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) with Honours from Canberra School of Art and a MA (Fine Art) from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, University of Central England, UK, he completed his doctorate at the School of Art, National Institute of the Arts, ANU in Canberra in 2004.

Danie has gone on to win many national awards, including the 26th Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2009, the 2006 Canberra Critic's Choice Award for Visual Arts, and has most recently won the 2010 Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing. In 2006 he also received Research and Development funding from the University of Sydney.

Danie's work is held in numerous private and public collections including National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank and the Kerry Stokes Collection. Danie has received two grants from the Visual Arts Board; the most recent a 2009 New Work Grant to create taxidermy sculpture and installation works for exhibition at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery.