Women have contributed to the creative industries throughout history.
On International Women’s Day, guests from Melbourne’s arts community share perspectives from creative women working in art, design and academia.
Moderator
Amanda Smith is a broadcaster at ABC Radio National (RN) where she is the presenter of Sporty. On RN, Amanda has previously presented Life Matters, The Body Sphere and arts programs including Artworks and The Deep End. She is currently an ambassador for Flesh After Fifty, a project about changing images of older women in art.
Speakers
Dr Kate Just is a visual artist and Head of Graduate Coursework at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne where she has been a lecturer since 2005. Just works across sculpture, installation, textiles and photography to investigate the diverse histories of female representation. She has been the recipient of grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, City of Melbourne and Creative Victoria. She won the 2015 Wangaratta Textile Prize and the 2014 Rupert Bunny Visual Art Fellowship and she has undertaken residencies at Gertrude Contemporary and the Australian Tapestry Workshop, as well as international residencies in Spain, India, Japan and Austria.
Saba Alemayoh is the owner of Saba’s Ethiopian Restaurant and Founder of Afro Hub. Saba opened Saba’s Ethiopian Restaurant with her mother as the head chef at the age of 25. The restaurant was awarded top 5 Good Food Cheap Eats 2017 and was invited to participate in the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in the same year. It also was positively reviewed in The New York Times in 2018. A year after opening Saba’s Ethiopian restaurant she founded Afro Hub, a social enterprise showcasing African artists in Melbourne. Afro Hub regularly curate and produce events around Melbourne.
Dr Maria Quirk is Assistant Curator, Collections and Research at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). A historian of women’s and art history, she has previously held academic positions at the University of Queensland and Deakin University, and is a former State Library of Queensland research fellow. Maria’s research has previously appeared in Woman’s Art Journal, The Journal of Victorian Culture and Visual Culture in Britain. Her first monograph, Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England: The Hustle and the Scramble was published by Bloomsbury in 2019.