DDCA welcomes new board members

2019 brings a change of faces to the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA) Board. We say a fond farewell to board members Sarah Miller (Wollongong), Matthew Allen (Deakin), Kim Vincs (Swinburne) and co-opted members Frank Millward and Bruce Watson who stepped down from their roles at the end of 2018. Here at NiTRO we thank them for their inspiration and enthusiasm and will miss their camaraderie.

DDCA’s continuing board members will be joined by Craig Batty, David Cross and Cat Hope.

Professor Craig Batty was recently appointed as Head of Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney, moving from RMIT University where he had spent 7 years as Creative Practice Research Leader and HDR Director, Specialising in screenwriting practice (craft and research),

Craig is passionate about creative practice research broadly, and creative doctorates specifically. He has published widely on both, including the recent co-edited book, Screen Production Research: Creative Practice as a Mode of Enquiry (2018), andScreenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context (2014). He is currently researching the screenwriting doctorate. Craig is Chair of the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) Research Sub-Committee, and head of the research portfolio for the Australian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP).

In his role with the DDCA, he hopes to bring more prominence to the areas of screen production and creative writing, which are important disciplines within the DDCA community. Passionate about HDR supervision, he also hopes to create opportunities for enhancing the research training of creative candidates, especially in a constantly shifting landscape where Government imperatives are forcing universities to re-conceptualise how they structure and supervise research degrees.

Professor David Cross is an educator, curator, artist, writer and public art consultant. His  art practice extends across performance, installation, sculpture, public art and video and is known for his inflatable structures and for the ways in which the work examines risk, pleasure and inter-personal exchange. 

He founded Litmus Research initiative at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand in 2007, an organisation focused on the commissioning and scholarship of public art. Litmus produced a number of ground breaking public art projects including One Day Sculpture http://www.onedaysculpture.org.nz a 1.5 million dollar series of temporary public artworks that took place across five cities in New Zealand in 2008/9.

He was the CAST 2011 international curator in residence in Hobart where he developed Iteration:Again 13 Public Artworks Across Tasmania http://www.iterationagain.com He was Deputy Chair of the City of Melbourne Public Art Advisory Board in 2015/6 and a former arts-sector advisor for Creative New Zealand. Since 2014 he has been Professor of Art and Performance at Deakin University where he recently developed Treatment: Six Public Artworks at Western Treatment Plant (2015) and was artistic director for the sophomore exhibition Treatment Flightlines (2017). The book of treatment published by Surpplus was published in March 2017. 

In 2017, along with Claire Doherty he convened the Melbourne Biennial lab. He has published extensively on public and contemporary art and the monograph on his practice Air Supplied was published in 2016 by Punctum books. In 2018 he founded with Katya Johansen Public Art Commission, a research initiative at Deakin University focusing on the making and scholarship of temporary public artworks.

Professor Cat Hope is an artist scholar with an active profile as a composer, sound artist, soloist and performer in music groups internationally. She is the director of the award winning new music ensemble Decibel that focuses on digital graphic notations.

Cat’s composition and performance practices focus on low frequency sound, drone, noise and improvisation and has been discussed in books such as Loading the Silence (Kouvaris, 2013), Women of Note (Appleby, 2012), Sounding Postmodernism (Bennett, 2011) as well as periodicals such as The Wire, Limelight, and Neu Zeitschrift Fur Musik Shaft.

In 2013 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study digital graphic music notations internationally, and she is a Fellow of Civitella Ranieri. Cat is the co- author of ‘Digital Arts – An introduction to New Media’ (Bloomsbury, 2014) and is Professor of Music and Head of School at the Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University. 

Craig and Cat are already contributors to NiTRO and we look forward to hearing from all three over the coming months.