Cindy Rodriguez is a filmmaker and community arts worker with an ongoing commitment to community cultural development and representing diversity.
Cindy has worked across Europe, Asia and Australia on feature films such as Mad Max and Fantastic Mr Fox and on filmmaking exchange programmes such as Looking for China. As a documentarian and community arts educator she has worked for PACT, Urban Theatre Projects, Belvoir Theatre, Performance Space, Milk Crate Theatre and Shopfront theatre.
A recent graduate from the Victorian College of the Arts, Cindy wrote and directed a 20minute Spanish language film taking inspiration from her Latin American roots.
Her next project is a stop-motion, animated web-series commissioned by the Port Phillip Council. It centres around a young girl, as she sets sails around the world trying to fight climate change.
An optimist by nature, Cindy believes in the power of storytelling as a means to connect with people and drive positive, social change.
Stuart Gallagher loves nothing more than sit in the park, feed the birds and eat sultanas. He hopes to make this a full time career one day. In the meantime he works for University of NSW tutoring young minds on political theory. He also writes for the BBC and ABC and has a collection of poems, plays, novels and film scripts ready for the publisher.
He has worked across Europe and Australia and won the university medal and Orion Young Writers award for his poems.
At the moment he is writing Cindalay, a stop motion animation about climate change, of which has composed all the music. He occasionally puts down the pencil to play the piano and guitar.
Isla Shaw is a theatre and costume designer who works in the UK and Australia. Her most recent design work includes Cat in the Hat for Leicester Curve (UK), My Robot for Barking Gecko Theatre (AU) and The Witches (UK) which also toured to Hong Kong.
As a child Isla loved making dollhouses and it seems nothing much has changed. You’ll often find her making miniatures sets and figuring out dimensions before turning her imagined world into life sized theatre sets.
Nina Sepahpour is a textile designer and artist from Melbourne and received her Bachelor in Textile Design from RMIT in 2013.
Her work is an experimental and abstract response to her environment, influenced by society, it's patterns and the simple moments of everyday life.
Nina explores the crossovers of both analogue and digital techniques and her process is intuitive as concepts gradually develop through the layering of motif, pattern, shape and colour.
She is driven by innovation, excited by non-traditional methods of work and is developing her practice through conceptual work, projects and collaborations.