Elizabeth MacFarlane
Chief Investigator
Elizabeth MacFarlane is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne where she teaches Short Fiction, Graphic Narratives and Thinking Writing: Theory and Creativity. She is co-director of graphic novel publishing house Twelve Panels Press, and co-directed the artists’ residency Comic Art Workshop from 2015 to 2019. She writes short fiction, experimental fiction, and autobiography, and has published several articles and a monograph on the work of J. M. Coetzee. From 2016 to 2019 she was a Chief Investigator on ARC Linkage project 'Superheroes: Creative Force, Cultural Zeitgeist and Transmedia Phenomenon’ with project partner the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. As part of this project, she organised two international conferences, a major exhibition on Cleverman, and edited a scholarly collection for Routledge press called Superhero Bodies. Elizabeth lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne, on the sovereign unceded land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.
Pat Grant
Chief Investigator
Pat Grant is a renowned cartoonist from the Illawarra region of NSW. His work has appeared in Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, and The Lifted Brow, as well as in magazines such as Artlink, Australia's Surfing Life, and Tracks. He is the recipient of an Emerging Writers Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. His short comics include ‘The Last Sharehouse,’ ‘Waiting for Something to Happen,’ and the Ledger-award winning Toormina Video. His first graphic novel, Blue, was listed as one of the great graphic novels of 2012 by the US culture journal Salon, and his 2020 graphic novel The Grot is in the official selection list of the 2021 Angouleme Comics Festival.
Gabriel Clark
Chief Investigator
Gabriel Clark s a lecturer at the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney his research is predominately focused on design and multimodal storytelling.
He has led innovative design and storytelling projects for the Visual Communications degree and has been awarded a number of grants and commissions for his work as a researcher in Comics and Graphic Storytelling.
He is also a digital content producer conceiving and producing a number of multimodal storytelling projects for ABC iview, ABC radio, Fbi Radio, City of Sydney and the Sydney Opera House. Gabriel conceived and co-produces the cult graphic storytelling event Read to Me, the award-winning multimodal storytelling project Radio With Pictures, and is a co-founder of Graphic festival at the Sydney Opera House.
Ronnie Scott
Chief Investigator
Ronnie Scott is a Senior Lecturer in RMIT’s Bachelor of Arts (Creative Writing), where he introduced a studio that teaches comics to third-year writing students with Preston-based Risograph publisher, Glom Press. He’s the author of a Penguin Special (Salad Days), author of two books of nonfiction for the National Gallery of Victoria, editor of two anthologies, and from 2007 to 2011 edited independent literary magazine The Lifted Brow. His recent writing is published in Spectrum, Good Weekend Summer Fiction Issue, New Writing, The Guardian, PEN Melbourne Journal, and on a hoarding commissioned by Melbourne Writers Festival and Metro Tunnels. His 2020 novel The Adversary was shortlisted for the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and his next novel, Shirley, will be published in 2023.
Claudia Chinyere Akole
Research Assistant
Claudia Chinyere Akole is an exhibiting artist, illustrator, cartoonist, designer, animator, and educator based in Sydney, Australia (unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal Peoples of the Eora Nation). She works as a freelance illustrator, animator & cartoonist, and creates comics and illustrations in her personal practice. She's an art hag who bleeds pink – and a notorious crybaby with work that tends to cover cultural identity, abstraction, and mental health.
Claudia has taught design, comics, and animation workshops at various levels including high school, university, and professional settings. She’s taught comic-making workshops to high school students from migrant and refugee backgrounds through the NSW organization STARTTS. She’s the 2021 Facilitator for Toolkits: Graphic Narratives, an online graphic storytelling program for young Australian writers. And she’s a Tutor and Research Assistant in the Faculty of Design, Architecture, and Building at University of Technology, Sydney (UTS DAB).
Claudia has established the Tracing Paper Comix style, which involves creating final comic art traditionally using paint markers on multiple layers of tracing paper. Her visual signature consists of bold block colour and abstract line work rendered by hand predominantly in paint and marker mediums.
Claudia is also a part of the organizing team for Read To Me – A live graphic storytelling event in Sydney and beyond.
Image by Sarah McNeil
ada connor
RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Ada Connor is a transfeminine writer and transcriptionist who lives on Wurundjeri land. Their poetry and nonfiction has been published in Going Down Swinging, The Lifted Brow, The Suburban Review, The Guardian, Overland, Peach Mag, and others. Ada's loved comics since they were very young, and seems to constantly find themselves surrounded by comics artists, but the closest they've come to actually creating them has been writing the character of Mulbert for Advicecomics.
Meg O’Shea
Research Assistant
Meg O'Shea is a Korean adoptee maker of stories, pictures and sometimes pictures that move based in Sydney, Australia (unceded Wangal land).
She makes largely autobiographical and non-fiction work that has featured on The Nib, The Lily, ABC's Radio With Pictures and in various anthologies including Comic Sans, Steady Diet, Threads That Connect Us and Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment and Survival, which in 2020 won the Eisner Award for Best Anthology. She has exhibited comic, animation and film work internationally, and has also conducted comic workshops for high school-aged students from migrant and refugee backgrounds with STARTTS and art programs for elementary-aged students in South Korea.
Meg is currently working on a long-form work based on her experiences as the Asian child of white parents in Australia, a recent period of living in Korea, and a failed search for her Korean mother.
Bernard Caleo
PhD Candidate
Bernard Caleo will be writing a PhD on the production and construction of place in Australian comics as part of the research project. Bernard was the editor of Tango, a comics anthology series which was published irregularly from 1997 to 2009. Bernard has also been making comics and zines since 1990 including short pieces for the Melbourne City of Literature and Cambridge University Press. With Erica Wagner and Elizabeth MacFarlane, Bernard co-directs the publishing enterprise Twelve Panels Press, which translated and published Jan Bauer's graphic novel The Salty River in 2015 and will shortly release Safdar Ahmed’s graphic novel Still Alive in 2021. In 2018 he illustrated the book How to Win a Nobel Prize, written by Lorna Hendry and published by Black Inc. The book was shortlisted for A Western Australia Premier's Literary Awards in 2019. In 2012, collaborating with filmmaker Daniel Hayward, Bernard directed a feature documentary called Graphic Novels! Melbourne! focusing on the long-form comics work of Nicki Greenberg, Mandy Ord, Pat Grant and Bruce Mutard. It premiered in a laneway in Carlton in November 2012 and at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France in February 2013. Bernard was a Creative Fellow at the State Library of Victoria, 2014, and in 2016 won the Platinum Ledger Award for contributions to Australian comic book culture.