Lisa Cahill has made a profound impact on the arts community through a range of leadership roles, specifically the design community in Sydney through her work as CEO and Artistic Director of the Australian Design Centre.

Prior to becoming involved with ADC, Lisa held senior government positions both locally and nationally at various arts and media organisations including the Australian Design Alliance, the Australia Council for the Arts, the City of Sydney, the Australian Broadcasting Authority and SBS. She has also worked as research consultant for the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies, and as a curator on exhibitions in Japan and Australia.

Brian Parkes has been CEO at JamFactory in Adelaide since April 2010. He has overseen significant development of the organisation’s exhibition and training programs and substantial growth in its audience, income diversity and operational budget.

He is passionate about good design and fine craftsmanship and has worked in senior curatorial and commercial management roles in the visual art, craft and design sector in Australia for over 30 years.

Gay Hawkins is a professor in social and cultural theory at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. She researches in the areas of science and technology studies and environmental humanities with a focus on media animals, waste, water and plastics. She has done research projects with SBS, the ABC, Sydney Water and many community organisations.

She is currently doing a project funded by the ARC on littering and urban habits. She is also working on a history of disposability. Some books include ‘Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water’ co-authored with Kane Race and Emily Potter (MIT 2015), ‘The Ethics of Waste’ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006) and ‘The SBS Story’ co-authored with Ien Ang and Lamia Dabboussy (UNSW Press 2008).

Liane Rossler is an artist, designer and curator who has worked in creative industries for over thirty years, and has spent the last fifteen years focused on projects that intersect art, design and the environment.

Alongside her solo creative practices, she is founder of Superlocalstudio, which inspires collaborative, socially engaged cultural and creative projects for diverse audiences. Liane was co-founder, former designer and director of Dinosaur Designs for twenty five years.

Joanna van der Zanden works as an independent curator and initiator of cross-disciplinary socially engaged arts and design projects. She is particularly interested in the exploration of cultural formats where the public at large gets involved in the process of research, questioning and making. It is her view that contemporary cultural centres should – at the best – function as catalysts to stimulate critical and creative thinking and making and enlarge time and space for experimentation and reflection. Especially in these times of paradigm shift, we need to re-educate each other and find new common grounds. Recurrent themes are repair (initiator and co-editor of the Repair Manifesto), waste and happiness.