NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

APPLIED COMPASSION with Pearl Tan, Catherine Kolomyjec and Claire Tonkin

PEARL TAN—This edition of Creative Matters is all about leadership and thriving. Leadership has many models, we have transformational, authentic, situational the list goes on, and we can also put this in the context of our increasing awareness of First Nations values and knowings such as valuing process and relationships and deep listening.

And if we’re talking about thriving… the screen industry has poor mental health. Studies from Screen Well show that the Australian Entertainment industry has 10 times higher symptoms of anxiety than the general population, 7 times higher symptoms of sleep disorders and 5 times higher symptoms of depression.

My questions today are, can something like Applied Compassion help us when it comes to leadership and thriving, and how might we go about applying compassion in both education and screen production. To answer these questions, we’ll be speaking with two people. Catherine Kolomyjec, a Stanford Ambassador for Applied Compassion and founder of The Kindness Challenge, and her sister Claire Tonkin, Head of Drama at CJZ and former Network Drama Executive at Network 10.

LISTEN TO PEARL’S INTERVIEWS WITH CATHERINE AND CLAIRE

Read the transcript

Pearl Tan is the Discipline Lead in Directing at AFTRS. She is completing her PhD in Creative Practice at UNSW, focusing on the experience of diverse creatives in the screen industry. As part of her PhD, she has released a fictional podcast entitled Diversity Work, that features a diverse television writers’ room trying to tick all the diversity boxes at once. You can listen to Diversity Work on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Main image L to R: Claire Tonkin, Catherine Kolomyjec and Pearl Tan

More from this issue

Artists in academia

BY BEATA BATOROWICZ — provocations on traversing research and industry success within creative practice.

The ‘tension’ between industry and

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More from this issue

DDCA National Forum on evaluation of creative practice research
BY SMILJANA GLISOVIC — On August 9, 2024 the DDCA held a National Forum to generate discussion on the shape of the future of creative practice research in Australia (and beyond). The particular focus of the event was on research evaluation and assessment, chosen because of the current reviews of ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia).
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Creative practice research and university cultures
BY MIA LINDGREN — I asked AI to give me a list of words including the prefix ‘non’: non-profit, non-negotiable, non-essential and so on. The non prefix is used to indicate the opposite, absence or exclusion of the root words, meaning it signals a deviation from the standard, typical or expected.
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Parity in ERA submissions across universities
BY JESSICA WILKINSON — In the ERA 2018 exercise I was invited to be an assessor for the Creative Writing field. Of the five universities assigned to me for assessment of submissions within this code, I encountered wildly different approaches to how each university collated the 'top 30%' of representative samples.
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Artists in academia
BY BEATA BATOROWICZ — provocations on traversing research and industry success within creative practice. The ‘tension’ between industry and academia, in addition to having diverse roles within the broader creative arts research ecology of development and contribution, also describes an interconnectedness: they both feed into each other in building notions of success.
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On reviewer training and guidelines
BY CRAIG BATTY — Do we agree on what we are looking for in research assessment in creative disciplines? As a DASSH survey in 2018 revealed, assessors (at least those surveyed) had mixed views about what was important – from theoretical contributions, to industry contributions, to hybrid contributions, and so on – the caveat ‘it depends’ came up strongly.
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Out of this world
BY DAVID CROSS — Oh, to be world standard. To have reached the peak of global creative practice. To have left behind the parochialism of local concerns and made it in the places, contexts and ruthlessly competitive environments that truly matter.
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Forum key discussion points
Thank you to all that so generously and respectfully contributed to the conversation on the day of the National Online Forum, both ‘on mic’ and in ‘the chat’. The contributions in the below text are not assigned to individuals but rather the general threads and themes are summarised. For more nuance (and less unintended interpretive valence from me) I do encourage you to watch the recording of the forum here.
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‘How’s the weather?’
BY JULIA PRENDERGAST and JEN WEBB — Let us begin by introducing ourselves: we are Associate Professor Julia Prendergast, AAWP President/Chair, and Distinguished Professor Jen Webb, AAWP Treasurer – accepting the invitation to contribute on behalf of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of creative writing (Australasia).
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Creative arts research excellence and ‘world standard’
BY VERONIKA KELLY and CHARLES ROBB for ACUADS — The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) is the nation’s peak organisation representing the interests of art and design schools within Australian higher education. Here, ACUADS draws attention to issues surrounding the interpretation and positioning of ‘world standard’ in creative practice research.
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Creative practice research advances in screen production
BY SUSAN KERRIGAN for ASPERA — Australian Screen Production Education and Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) has contributed greatly to the creation and assessment of Creative Practice Research (CPR) in Screen Production disciplines. This work began with the creation of the peak disciplinary body two decades ago, at that time only one person in the gathering held a PhD and was considered to be a legitimate researcher by the academy.
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ERA and the creative arts in Australian universities
BY CHARLES ROBB — When news broke that Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2023 had been cancelled, a palpable wave of relief swept through Australian universities – no more laborious compilation of packages, impact statements, and ranking spreadsheets.
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Performing arts in the academy: withering on the vine?
BY CAT HOPE — Despite an increasing number of artist scholars in the performing arts – those who have higher degree qualifications featuring the creative project/ exegesis model – are being employed in universities, it seems as if scholarly recognition for the so called ‘non traditional research output’ (NTRO) is in decline.
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Researching creative practice research
BY SMILJANA GLISOVIC and CRAIG BATTY — The discussion amongst colleagues at the DDCA National Forum on evaluation and assessment of creative practice research – where more than 100 from a range of disciplines were in attendance – was informed, considered and encouraging.
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Artists’ practice as methodological imperative in the evaluation of Creative Practice Research 
BY ANDREA RASSELL and JO POLLITT — In thinking about the development of a standardisation of assessment of creative research, we, as interdisciplinary artist scholars practising respectively in filmmaking/media and choreographic writing/dance/feminist environmental humanities, are constantly reforming our identities as researchers and artists.
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Art and Australia’s Climate Disaster
GUEST EDITOR JANE W. DAVIDSON — Extreme weather events have been experienced in so-called Australia for millennia. This settler painting shows the terror and chaos captured by William Strutt in a depiction of Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (painted in 1864 and now part of the State Library of Victoria’s Pictures Collection). From records of the time, around five million hectares burnt, which amounts to a staggering quarter of Victoria, and on the same day, with temperatures over 43 degrees Celsius in the shade, large swathes of western Tasmania also burnt.
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From psychological and social recovery to radical reimagining: Reviewing studies of arts, culture and disasters
BY CLAIRE HOOKER and ANNA KENNEDY-BORISSOW — It is well recognised that one of the hallmarks of climate change is an increase in the frequency and severity of disasters (IPCC, 2023). The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, 2007) defines disasters as a ‘serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society,’ and these disruptions result from interactions between hazards and human systems (Peek et al., 2021; Perry, 2018).
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Creative Arts and the Climate Emergency:  Building Collective and Resilient Futures
BY SUSANNE THUROW, HELENA GREHAN AND JANE W. DAVIDSON — In this short paper, we aim to explore the potential role creative arts might play in fostering community preparedness in view of the increasing extreme weather scenarios playing out across the globe.
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Confronting Fire and Disaster in Theatrical Performance
BY PETA TAIT — This article outlines ARC funded research about the representation of ecological damage and climate change in Australian drama, theatre and contemporary performance. The project summary is followed by a brief discussion of artistic depictions of fire and disaster that refers to a community-based play based on the lived experience of its audience, and a performative work in which participants rehearse for a future disaster.
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Youth theatre and the climate crisis: Performing resistance and survival
BY SARAH WOODLAND AND LINDA HASSALL — The escalation of ecological crises and climate-related disasters is impacting individual health and community wellbeing globally. The World Health Organization has highlighted that 3.6 billion people now live in regions highly susceptible to climate change, and the health impacts will cost economies US$2-4 billion per year by 2030 (WHO 2023).
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Fire Aesthetics: Film and Television in the Pyrocene
BY BELINDA SMAILL — This essay explores how screen aesthetics have been deployed in our new era of fire. In Australia this era is marked by Black Saturday in 2007 and the Black Summer fires of 219/20. As both public knowledge and fire events have evolved the filmmaking community has responded with a largely documentary focused body of work. Examining this new turn in film and television’s narrative and visual interest in fire, I couch this study within Australia’s cinematic history of fire, recognising its intersection with the environmental history of fire and this new phase: the Pyrocene.
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