Asia-Pacific
Arts Awards 2025

Chun Yin Rainbow Chan (陳雋然) is an award-winning vocalist, producer and multi-disciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. She is interested in notions of authenticity, mistranslations and matrilineal histories. Chan has performed at Sydney Opera House, Vivid, MONA FOMA, Melbourne Music Week, Iceland Airwaves, SXSW Festival and more. Her works have been shown by Artspace, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Firstdraft, Cement Fondu, and 8th Yokohama Triennale. In 2023 she premiered The Bridal Lament, a one-woman music and performance work that explores the songs of an obsolete wedding ritual from Hong Kong’s Weitou 圍頭 (‘walled village’) people, part of her matrilineal heritage.

Grace Heifetz grew up between Sydney and the Blue Mountains and has lived in London and San Francisco. She returned to Australia in 2002 and began working at Curtis Brown, where she worked in a variety of roles before launching Left Bank Literary with Gaby Naher in July 2019.

Heifetz is the Chair of Open Book internship program, which is an industry-wide initiative which aims to make practical steps towards addressing the lack of diversity in the Australian publishing industry across all levels and sectors. Heifetz was a board member of NYWF for three years and is also on the board of the Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival. 

S. Shakthidharan is a western Sydney storyteller with Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry. His two plays  Counting and Cracking and  The Jungle and the Sea, made with Eamon Flack and Belvoir, have won 7 Helpmanns, 7 Sydney Theatre Awards and 3 Premier’s Prizes between them, and toured internationally. But most importantly they’ve had a profound impact on the global Sri Lankan diaspora. Shakthi is Director of Kurinji, was co-founder of Co-Curious and was founder and Artistic Director of CuriousWorks from 2003-2018. He was the inaugural Associate Artist at Carriageworks and is a recipient of both the Phillip Parson’s and Kirk Robson awards.

Annette Shun Wah is a writer, creative producer, theatremaker and festival director. She was Artistic Director of Adelaide Festival Centre’s OzAsia Festival (2020-2023) Australia’s largest annual multi-arts festival engaging with Asia.

From 2011-2022 Shun Wah led Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, creating professional pathways for artists from culturally diverse backgrounds, and bringing Asian Australian stories to main stages and major festivals.

Shun Wah was awarded an honorary Master of Fine Arts by NIDA in 2023. She serves on the Boards of the Sydney Theatre Company, the National Film and Sound Archive, and is a member of the Asian Producers Platform.

Dr. Priya Srinivasan is a thought leader, performer, choreographer, and writer. Srinavasan leads Sangam, a transformative cultural platform addressing inequity in the arts in Naarm. Since 2019, Sangam has thrived under her guidance, showcasing over 300 South Asian creatives towards self representation and artistic excellence. Rooted in Indian classical dance, Srinivasan’s work emphasises feminist decolonisation, spotlighting minority women’s histories. Her acclaimed intercultural pieces have graced stages worldwide, from the USA, China, Europe, India to Australia. Notably, ground-breaking works like The Durga Chronicles (Green Room Award Winner) and Agam at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra have shifted Australian contemporary practice. Srinivasan directs innovative projects like Serpent Dreaming Women, Churning Waters and Bunyi Bunyi Bumi, fostering equitable intercultural collaborations that offer models for engagement between First Nations and Asian Australians.

Since 1970 William Yang has photographed Sydney’s social life. In 1989 he integrated his skills as a writer and a visual artist, and began to perform monologues with slide projection in theatres that tell personal stories and explore issues of identity. He has done 12 full length performances, many of which have toured the world. He continues to exhibit in galleries, including the successful retrospective exhibition Seeing and Being Seen at QAGOMA in Brisbane in 2021. He often works with Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, teaching others his story telling method.

Led by Aaron Choulai, the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) is a prominent contemporary ensemble, pushing artistic boundaries by transcending genres and dismantling barriers between disciplines, forms, and cultures.

Navigating the intersections of avant-garde and traditional, art and popular music, and electronic and acoustic approaches, the AAO crafts music spanning the spectrum from improvised to notated forms.

With a focus on fostering a distinct language of creativity tied to Australia and the Asia Pacific region, the AAO’s fearless artistic pursuit shapes a unique and culturally rooted musical landscape.

The Australia-Taiwan First Nations Art Exchange is an ongoing project that brings together and builds enduring connections between First Nations artists in the region through a series of programs that support and inspire sustained dialogue and collaboration. These programs include an international symposium (2021); publication; field trips (2023); artist residencies and a documentary film (2024); and a touring exhibition (2025-onwards). Recognising the shared experiences and diverse cultural expressions of First Nation artists across the region, numerous established and emerging First Nation artists from Australia and Taiwan especially, as well as New Zealand, have participated in this program. The project is developed by Dr. Sophie McIntyre (QUT) in collaboration with Dr. Fang Chun-wei (National Museum of Prehistory Taiwan) and participating First Nation artists, especially Vernon Ah Kee, Mandy Quadrio, Judy Watson, Yuma Taru, Anchi Lin, and Akac Orat who have been involved since the inception of the project. This ongoing project has received funding and in-kind support from: Ministry of Culture Taiwan, EVAAir, Queensland University of Technology, and the National Prehistory Museum Taiwan.

Hi-Viz Satellites brings together artists to seed collaborations and deepen understanding across artistic practices and cultures. A key aspect of this program is Hi-Viz Satellites LABS, which in 2023-2024 brought together 14 artists from Australia, Singapore and Taiwan through online and in-person exchanges.

It is underpinned by a 3-year partnership (2022-2024) with Punctum Inc (regional Victoria) and SAtheCollective (Singapore). The program is an extension of Chamber Made’s Hi-Viz Practice Exchange, which emerged in 2018 from the need to make space for women and non-binary artists working across performance, sound and music to exchange ideas and form new networks.

Hyphenated Projects is a network of artists with transcultural practices and a collective that presents, collaborates and develops new ideas. They focus on supporting artists who operate with the hyphens—culturally, socially and geographically. Situated in a suburban house in Sunshine West, Melbourne, the space has supported artists, producers and researchers through an artist residency and development program since 2019. 

Hyphenated Projects was founded after presenting a survey exhibition of Asian-Australian artists in Victoria at The Substation titled Hyphenated  (2018). Since then, we have partnered and collaborated with Due West Arts Festival, Next Wave, Footscray Community Arts, ACMI, Incinerator Gallery and The Substation with a range of contemporary and community arts projects. In 2020-2022, they delivered their largest project to date: Hyphenated Biennial, a multi-venue exhibition across Melbourne’s West.  

Portside Review is an online journal from and for the Indian Ocean. Established in 2021, it publishes essays, short stories, poems, conversations, activism, photos and interviews. With 12 issues, it has worked with more than 350 artists in many languages and forms.

Editors have been based in Australia, Singapore, Myanmar, Indonesia, South Africa, India, Malaysia; with support from Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries (WA); Creative Australia and the Founders Circle of Centre for Stories.

Portside Review is grateful to be based on Whadjuk Country where the river and ocean meet near a port called Walyalup, ‘the place of the small kangaroo rat’.

Women’s Wealth is an art project that engages with the ongoing importance and richness of women’s creativity within the predominantly matrilineal societies of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and nearby provinces of the Solomon Islands. Co-curated by Sana Balai, Taloi Havini and Ruth McDougall, the project was co-created with the Buka based Hakö Women’s Collective and Marilyn Havini.

The project was launched on Buka Island in April 2017 and presented as part of the  9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) in Brisbane from 24 November 2018 to 14 July 2019.

At the intersection of conceptual, staged and documentary image-making, Hoda Afshar’s artistic practice explores the representation of gender, marginality and displacement. Initially drawn to the potential of the documentary image to unearth hidden realities, she is equally committed to critiquing the collusion between the photographic medium and hierarchies of power.

Informed by her own experience with migration and cultural displacement, Afshar’s work takes the intrusiveness of the camera as a point of departure to unpack the relationship among truth, power and the image while disrupting traditional image-making conventions.

Afshar’s works are held in major collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Kadist Collection in Paris, National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Auckland University Art Collection, the Monash University of Modern Art Collection, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Afshar’s works have been exhibited widely in Australia and abroad. In 2023, her first major survey exhibition opened at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney accompanied by a publication. It was in 2021, that her first monograph Speak the Wind was published by MACK in London. Other exhibitions include: Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah (2023), The National 4: Australian Art Now (2023), STILL ALIVE, Aichi Triennial, Nagoya (2022); Between the Sun and the Moon, Lahore Biennale, Lahore (2020), Speak the Wind, Monash Gallery of Art & PHOTO 2022 Festival of Photography, Melbourne (2022).

Afshar was a recipient of The Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship in 2021. She was awarded the National Photographic Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra in 2015, and the Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne in 2018. Afshar holds a PhD in Creative Arts from the Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia.

Zoe Butt  is a curator and writer focusing on critical thinking and historically conscious artistic communities, fostering dialogue among cultures of the globalising souths. As a Founder/Director of ‘in-tangible institute’, a curatorial platform nurturing locally-responsive infrastructure for the arts across Southeast Asia, she possesses an extensive exhibition, publishing and public-speaking history globally, leading artist-driven initiatives for over 15 years in firstly China and then Vietnam.

Butt holds a PhD by Published Works, University of Westminster, London and is currently Lead Advisor, Southeast Asia and Oceania for Kadist Art Foundation (Paris/San Francisco). She lives between Chiang Mai, Ho Chi Minh City and Sydney.

Club  Até is a collective formed in 2014 by multi-form artists Justin Shoulder and  Bhenji  Ra. Their practice traverses video, performance and  club  events with an emphasis on community activation. Collaborating with members of the queer Asia Pacific diaspora in Australia and the Philippines, the collective is invested in creating their own Future Folklore: a language that merges ancient knowledge with contemporary practice. Past  Club  Até events have taken the form of Pageants, Variety Nights and Balls.

Club  Até have been invited and commissioned to perform and exhibit their works across Australia and internationally, in a diverse range of spaces and settings including festivals, independent and institutional galleries, theatres, nightclubs and outdoor environments.

In 2014, Luke George and Daniel Kok embarked on a trans-local artistic partnership spanning their home bases of Naarm Melbourne and Singapore / Berlin. Over a decade, they have developed unique performances and exhibitions that have been presented and toured across the Asia Pacific and the world, including commissions for the 2019 Venice Biennale, Liveworks Festivals 2018 and 2022, Rising 2022, Fremantle Biennale 2023, Auckland Live 2024, and AsiaTOPA in both 2019 and 2025. Their work, STILL LIVES: MELBOURNE received 2 Greenroom Awards including Outstanding Achievement for Contemporary and Experimental Performance.

Luke George is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, craft and curation. Luke has been a recipient of the 2022 Chloe Munroe Fellowship, 2021 PlayKing Foundation Renewal Fellowship, 2019 Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship (Dance), and 2007 Russell Page Fellowship for Contemporary Dance. Luke was co-artistic director of Stompin Youth Dance Company (2002-08), Artistic Associate of Temperance Hall (2020-23) and is currently a studio artist at the Collingwood Yards.

Daniel Kok has a BA in Fine Art & Critical Theory (Goldsmiths College, London, 2001), an MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship (HZT, Berlin, 2012) and has studied Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies (APASS, Brussels, 2014). As artistic director of Dance Nucleus (Singapore), he focuses on building capacities for interdisciplinary praxis and trans-local partnerships in Asia and Australia.

Mayu Kanamori is a Japanese Australian artist. Her performances include The Heart of the Journey, CHIKA: A Documentary Performance, Yasukichi Murakami: Through a Distant Lens and You’ve Mistaken Me For A Butterfly. Her regional community-based projects included Cowra Voices, In Repose, and audio work with Nyamba Buru Yawuru’s multi award winning Jetty to Jetty Heritage Trail and  Lustre: Pearling & Australia.

Her recent photography exhibitions included Teiju to wa Nandaro and Untitled.Showa. She has received commendation for the United Nations Association Media Peace Award / Promotion of Multicultural Issues, Broome NAIDOC Non-Indigenous Reconciliation Award and was a finalist at the Walkley Awards. She is a founding member of Nikkei Australia.

Monica Lim is a sound artist and composer whose work spans installations, performance art, contemporary dance and screen.  She is interested in new cross-disciplinary forms as well as combinations of new technology with music. Monica is currently undertaking postgraduate research at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, in interactive composition.

Of Malaysian heritage, she is actively engaged in collaborative art-making and research with artists in Southeast Asia. Lim is co-founder of Project Eleven, a philanthropic initiative which supports contemporary arts in Australia and the Asia Pacific and serves on various non-profit arts Boards.

Kimberley Moulton is a Yorta Yorta  woman based in Melbourne originally from Shepparton, country Victoria. She is an accomplished Senior Curator and writer and the Adjunct Curator Indigenous Art Tate Modern, London and Senior Curator at RISING, Melbourne’s international arts festival. 

Moulton previously held curatorial roles at Museums Victoria (2009-2023) and was the Senior Curator Southeastern First Peoples collection at Museums Victoria (2016-2023). Her practice works with  knowledge, histories, ancestral memory and futures at the intersection of historical collections and contemporary art.

Her work is located within the rethinking of global art histories, expanding on what inclusion, exhibitions and research in and out of institutions can be for First Peoples communities and artists more broadly.

Her recent exhibitions include co-curatorial project First Nations Triennial, Nahdobii: To Draw Water  which toured Canada, New Zealand, Australia 2021-2023,  More Than A Tarrang: Memory, Material and Cultural Agency  (Melbourne Museum, 2023) and  Shadow Spirit  (RISING, Flinders Street Station historic rooms, 2023).

She is currently  a PhD candidate in curatorial practice with the Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab Monash University and curator Tarrawarra Biennale 2025.  

Based on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne, Chamber Made cultivates adventurous multi-artform practice to disrupt and rewrite conventions of live performance. Their commitment to collaboration, appetite for innovation, and ongoing fascination in the intersecting spaces between artforms speak directly to a 21st century Australia enriched by the meeting of cultures. Led by acclaimed performance-maker and director, Tamara Saulwick, Chamber Made has presented over 100 performance seasons in Australia, NZ, Asia, Europe, USA and South America. The company has commissioned over 55 new Australian works and engaged countless artists since it was founded in 1988.

Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (CAAP) is the only professional arts company dedicated to making exceptional contemporary Asian Australian work for all audiences. They engender greater cultural diversity in Australian performing arts by producing cross art form theatrical works of the highest quality, in partnership with major festivals and flagship companies. CAAP leads in developing, nurturing, and championing Asian Australian artists to take their place on main stages nationally and internationally.

CAAP provide the scaffolding for Asian Australian artists to thrive in a more equitable and representative industry. In all that they do, they work to transform the Australian theatre landscape.

Gamelan DanAnda (GDA) is a Balinese percussion orchestra based in Melbourne/Naarm.

GDA’s performances feature shimmering cascades of metallic sound, virtuosic rhythms and breathtaking crescendos. They perform at major festivals and convene their own, including the 2023 Gathering of Gamelans, bringing 1000 people to enjoy music from 8 Victorian gamelans.

They created Saudara Sound System at OzAsia Festival 2023 with Joelistics, and Balinese master artist Yande King’s melding gamelan and dance with electronics. In 2023 they also collaborated with jazz-fusion band Firetail.

“A new–and thoroughly beguiling–musical language”, “wooden hammers dancing in perfect unison or forging intricate, interlocking patterns”. The Age

Marrugeku is an unparalleled presence in Australia today, developing new dance languages that are restless, transformative and unwavering. Marrugeku builds bridges and breaks down walls between urban and remote dance communities, between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and between local and global situations.

Mutiara  reflects on 100 years of the pearl shell industry along the shores of Rubibi (Broome) to highlight the unsung bonds between First Peoples of the Kimberley and workers of the Malay diaspora. Taking a window from the 1870s when early free diving practices were entwined with the slavery of Indigenous peoples, the dangerous and brutal conditions of the industry continued through decades of exploitation of indentured Asian workers to the early 1970s.

Co–choreographers and dancers  Dalisa Pigram, Soultari Amin Farid and  Zee Zunnur  with Broome’s  Ahmat Bin Fadal  (ex–pearl diver) collaborated with visual artist  Abdul–Rahman Abdullah,  composer  Safuan Johari,  dramaturg Rachael Swain,  costume designer Zoe Atkinson,  lighting designer Kelsey Lee and produced by Marrugeku with Singapore-based, Bahri & Co.

QAGOMA’s 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) included 69 projects by more than 150 artists and collaborators drawn together from over 30 countries. The exhibition looked to the future of art and explored how we navigate time and space, reimagine histories and explore connections to culture and place.

In close collaboration with co-curators, partner organisations and communities, four multi-artist projects focused on distinct regional contexts: Indigenous art in Taiwan; cultural expression in Northern Oceania; pre-colonial exchange between north-east Arnhem Land and South Sulawesi, Indonesia; and the contemporary ceremonial culture of Papua New Guinea’s Uramat community.

The Counterpoise Project is a testament to the unifying power of art, technology and human persistence. Amidst the global challenges presented by the pandemic, this project connected four eminent international entities: Restless Dance Theatre, the University of South Australia’s Connect2Abilities project, 29Dong Dance Theatre, and the Korean Music Project (KMP).

This collaborative force was further enriched by the cinematic expertise of Australian film director Matthew Byrne and the Korean documentary company, The Third Point Person. Together, they have harnessed online and offline technologies to bridge cultural divides and create a compelling work of art,  Counterpoise.

Alongside the dance theatre work is a documentary film and a dance video both of which are eagerly anticipated to grace global film festivals. This cross-continental endeavour not only showcases the resilience of the creative spirit but also heralds a new era of international artistic synergy. 

Arab Theatre Studio (ATS) is an independent Arab Australian artist-led contemporary arts and cultural organisation. It has a history of engagement with artists from socially diverse Arabic-speaking, South West Asia and North African backgrounds, with a focus on emerging, developing and established artists practising multi-artforms, being inclusive of first, second and third generations.

ATS grounds their thinking and practice in the principles of First Nations First, by engaging and collaborating with artists from diverse backgrounds,  and emerging, developing, and established creatives.

Since 2021 Arab Theatre Studio has run Open Dar, a trilogy of cultural events on Dharug Country across three locations in Granville, Blacktown and Bankstown featuring a diverse line-up of artists from Western Sydney and beyond.

In 2023 Arab Theatre Studio (ATS) and Pari co-led Lumbung in Western Sydney, an arts and cultural exchange residency held on Dharug Land. This residency welcomed art collectives and artists from Indonesia, Hong Kong and Malaysia to connect with collectives, artists, communities and audiences in Western Sydney and beyond. This program was an extension of ATS and Pari’s participation in Gudskul Indonesia’s artistic contribution to documenta fifteen, 2022.

A key program for the City of Melbourne, Arts House produces and presents a year-round program of contemporary art and performance. Arts House creates space for audiences and communities to gather, discuss and experience new ideas, new people and new worlds.

For 2023, Arts House’s Season 2 featured manifestos and memoirs, provocations and parties. The works were charged by questions of autonomy, consent and our power to reclaim power from forces beyond our control.

They had three Warehouse Residency commissions led by Disabled artists; an immersive dream space in which to rest, a solo cello performance about being struck by lightning, a dance piece about First Nations shapeshifting and much more. And they welcomed over 2,000 first time visitors into the North Melbourne Town Hall, and many thousands more to witness the Windows Commissions by Shrujana Shridhar and Sher Ali.

With equal measures of sincerity and frivolity, this program invited audiences to reflect and revel in experiences both unique and universal, and to explore boundaries, to be there for one another and to show up as ourselves.

In 2016 Our Stories with Your People was a model of exchange initiated by Moogahlin Performing Arts (Australia) with Tawata Productions (Aotearoa) and Native Earth Performing Arts (Turtle Island – Canada) through their development gatherings: Yellamundie Festival (Moogahlin), Breaking Ground (Tawata) and Weesageechak Begins to Dance (NEPA). They were all engaged in bringing stories to foreign shores and sharing these stories with local First Nations and Māori theatre-makers.

This model provided a way to articulate the primacy of a local story in a global context. Through this model of cultural arts exchange, the three companies were engaged in: 1. Building relationships and connections with local First Peoples theatre-makers in a global context. 2. Gaining insights into the complex process of negotiation, articulation, and translation of difference. 3. Building platforms for international presenters and new audiences to see international First Peoples’ work in development and in doing so provide an entry point for a relationship with new work.

The initiative continues to grow each year, broadening and deepening the level of exchange between First Peoples theatre-makers, local communities, presenters and audiences. At each point of contact, they learn something new about each other’s arts practice and culture, and engage critically with their own sense of identity and position in the world.

OzAsia Festival is Australia’s foremost multi-arts festival engaging with Asia while reflecting a contemporary multicultural Australia and championing innovative ideas and creative practices. Under Artistic Director Annette Shun Wah’s leadership (2020-2023), OzAsia Festival amplified Asian and Asian Australian artists and experiences, centring these voices at the heart of festival programming. This vision is exemplified by In Other Words, a dedicated showcase of Asian and Asian Australian writers and thinkers, and new addition to the festival program. Annette’s vision introduced audiences to brilliant artists and artistic works rarely seen on Australian stages while deepening creative and cultural connections and strengthening relationships between Australia and Asia.

SalamFest is an award winning, evidence-based, innovative response to issues and challenges faced by the Australian Muslim community.

SalamFest began as an annual cultural event showcasing the breadth of Muslim arts, culture, food and spiritual traditions in Melbourne as a creative response to Islamophobia. The festival has become a primary pillar in the SalamFest movement.

The SalamFest movement embodies key values of peace, love and compassion by inviting the wider Victorian and Australian community to share in culture and traditions, immerse in conversation and dialogues, and experience arts and cuisine, to break down barriers.