CHAIR

Victoria Alondra

Victoria Alondra is a poet, photographer, painter, and postgraduate student of mixed Nahua, Yaqui, and European ancestry. Born in Mexico, Victoria spent her early years between El Ahusco and Valloverde before her family was granted refugee status, settling in so-called Canada and spending her formative years in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside; Tsleil-Watuth, Squamish and Musqueam Territories. 

In her artistic practice, Victoria delves into the complex interplay of grief and joy, employing them as acts of resistance against capitalism and colonialism. Victoria has built a unique personal praxis that draws from both grassroots and institutional learning to imagine and remember justice-doing.

Victoria is a key member of Fundación José Hernàndez Delgadillo, an archival record of political muralism in Mexico and Mutua Crianza, a cultural revitalisation organisation, and has assisted with curations, poetry festivals and editing creative works. Beyond the realm of art, Victoria has dedicated the last 15 years to working for specialist therapeutic programs, family violence organisations, healing centres and incarcerated children. A long-term resident of Mparntwe, Victoria seeks to continue learning and working toward building a future where, as the Zapatistas say, another world is possible.

TREASURER

Ellanor Webb 

Ellanor is a photographer and arts worker with a passion for too many things to list. She has produced and participated in arts projects and exhibitions here and abroad, moving to Mparntwe from Meanjin/Magandjin in 2022 to work with Tangentyere Artists. Other working and volunteer positions have seen Ellanor support the delivery of diverse arts programming across organisations with varying missions and functions: DIY spaces, not-for-profits, contemporary studios and state institutions (QAGOMA, Art From the Margins, Gertrude Contemporary, among others). In 2024, Ellanor will move to Ngunnawal & Ngambri Country to work with artsACT and see out her term as Treasurer from afar.

SECRETARY

Lucy Stewart

Tim Chatwin

Tim Chatwin is an arts worker and artist who has worked in curatorial and exhibition design, installation, public programming, arts development, production and publishing across arts and cultural organisations on Arrernte and Palawa Country. After completing a degree in contemporary arts, he left lutruwita for the Northern Territory, working for a remote art centre, a number of community arts organisations and with the major arts institution in Mparntwe. In 2022 he decided to return to the immediacy, openness and connectedness of working with community-lead arts practices and processes, to prioritise First Nations voices, including the ongoing curatorial support of the Greenbush Art Group at the Alice Springs Prison, and with Desart Inc.

In his own practice, Tim is interested in the intersection of relationships with land and each other; places where contrasting values meet, clash and co-exist, and also how deep time and terrains influence our lives. He likes the act of walking, and cooking, and has a weakness for processed guitars, manipulated tape and any sound that comes on a wind or across distance. It’s reflective of an interest in deep listening, which his decade living on unceded Arrernte land has reinforced as critical to being here.

Kate Murphy

Kate M Murphy (aka Ellis Hutch) is an artist, writer and arts worker with experience working for a range of arts organisations from Craft ACT to the National Gallery of Australia, and for many years as a sessional lecturer at the ANU School of Art and Design. She moved to Mparntwe/Alice Springs in 2022 to work as a Visual Arts lecturer at Charles Darwin University and has fallen in love with the intense creative energy and powerful places on Arrernte country.

In her art practice Kate makes drawings, videos, installations, performances and soundscapes; both independently and in collaboration. She takes a curious and playful approach to investigating how people establish social relationships and transform their environments to create inhabitable spaces. She is fascinated with how we make ourselves ‘at home’ as individuals and communities while navigating the complexities of our contemporary worlds and colonial histories.

Chair

Kumalie Riley

Kumalie (Rosalie) Riley is an Arrernte woman from Alice Springs with spiritual affiliations and connections to the land, hereditary from her grandmother. Kumalie is a well known Arrernte Elder and artist with many years of experience teaching Arrernte language in local Alice Springs primary schools and in adult education.

Kumalie has been a WTS studio artist since 2020 and is the Chairperson of the WTS First Nations advisory group established in 2021.

Members
Sylvia Perrurle Neale
Ellaine Peckham
Sabella Turner
William (Nookie) Lowah
John Hodgson

CO-DIRECTOR

SAAR AMPTMEIJER

Saar Amptmeijer is an artist, arts worker and long term visitor on stolen Arrernte land. In recent years they primarily worked at Bindi Enterprises as a disability arts worker and within their own sonic and visual art practice. Born the Netherlands, Saar has worked and collaborated in different organisational structures, creative collaborations and collectives both in the NT and internationally. They are involved with Utrecht based art collective Kaap Kollektief, and as a supporter of Central desert community organisations such as Shut youth prisons and the Strong Grandmothers group.

As an artist, Saar researches and explores with a range of mediums, in the realms of sonic and visual art. They approach material and form within concepts of daily poetic considerations and social critique, ending in collaborative soundscapes, sculpture and drawings. They have a fascination for fantastic beings and b-grade sci fi where a future without prisons, gender identities, swooping synthesizers and a joy of disobedience can be envisioned.

DIRECTOR

JET NIKITINA-LI

Jet (aka Jess) is an ethnographer, artist and creative producer born on Boonwurrung lands and based in Mparntwe on Arrernte country. Jet’s work brings together research, video, writing and craft to critique and/or connect with marginality, place, power and bizarreness. Jet is a co-founder of Way Over There (WOT) Collective, an ARI based in the South-East suburbs of Naarm (areas represent) creating opportunities by and for BIPOC artists and their communities. Jet’s excited to keep finding or remembering ways to collaborate, experiment, collect, sustain, and imagine the otherwise together.

PROJECT & ADMIN SUPPORT OFFICER

JES COSTELLO

Jes is an artist and arts worker born, and raised in Mparntwe, Alice Springs. Jes uses whatever media they can get their hands on- always looking to try something new- to connect with their friends and family, by either making art for them, or doing art with them. They are still navigating the huge artscape that saturates their hometown, trying to figure out what stories they want to tell.
In recent years, she has been working at Jacksons Drawing Supplies, engaging with artists from all walks of life. And as of December 2023, they have completed a Certificate IV in Visual Arts, which sparked a huge interest in the behind the scenes of gallery work, and the world of arts administration.

GARDENER

JORGEN DOYLE

Jorgen is a visual artist, translator and gardener working in Alice Springs and Jakarta. Over the last five years he has developed an intensive collaborative practice with artist Hannah Ekin, expanding this collaboration to other communities and artists.

In Alice Springs, he is involved with the Watch This Space artist-run-initiative as an artist and gardener.

In Jakarta, Hannah and Jorgen work within a broad coalition of social movements, NGOs, artists, researchers, architects, journalists and activists concerned with the radical changes occurring along Jakarta's coastline - speculative real estate projects and large scale infrastructure projects responding to slower environmental degradation caused by heavy exploitation of the natural environment of the coastal basin. They collaborate with two Indonesian artists and a local community planning and advocacy organisation; the Rujak Centre for Urban Studies, on a project called Ziarah Utara, or Pilgrimage to the Coast. This project centres on an annual 2 week walk along the coastline of Jakarta, staying in the different kinds of sites and settlements - traditional fishing villages, gated communities, historical sites, the port, social housing blocks - that make up this highly segregated coastline dense with histories. They use the walk as a way to open up questions and conversations about the future of the coastline, how it is imagined by the capitalists who seek to re-make it as a place to mark Indonesia’s confident stride into a prosperous globalised future, and those who produce it on a daily basis as a space of livelihoods and belonging. This research methodology has to date produced artistic outputs that have included public forums and lectures, an exhibition, and video and installation works.