BrisCulture has been founded by Mark Bahnisch and Danielle Bentley. Our two core Brisculturators are most ably assisted by administrator Cate Gilpin.
Creative Brisbane panelists
Speakers at the Creative Brisbane Event: Mark Bahnisch, Danielle Bentley, Jaz Choi, Linda Carroli and Marcus Westbury. Our conversation will be chaired and facilitated by Bruce Muirhead.
Mark Bahnisch
Mark is a sociologist, writer, publisher, editor and consultant.
Mark teaches in the Faculty of Creative Industries at QUT, and works as a Researcher in the Smart Services CRC. He also lectures in writing and cultural studies at Griffith University’s School of Humanities.
He has worked in community organisations and the public sector, and has consulted to the Australian and Queensland Governments, private, public and arts/media sector organisations. His consulting work has won awards. He has published and spoken widely on cultural policy, creativity and the sociology and culture of Brisbane, and lectured for several years on Creative Industries theory and policy. His research currently focuses on online urbanism, distributed knowledge and urban creativity. Mark’s recently submitted PhD thesis examines the relation between the utopian imagination and social action. His doctoral research was conducted in the Humanities Program at QUT.
He is a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development.
Mark has contributed opinion pieces to a range of international and domestic publications, and founded the popular Australian blog Larvatus Prodeo. He writes regularly for New Matilda, On Line Opinion, Inside Story and Crikey, for whom he covered the 2006 and 2009 Queensland election campaigns.
Without straying too far from home, Mark recently debuted as a travel writer, authoring the Insiders’ Guide to Brisbane for Ninemsn.
Mark has been invited to speak at a number of conferences on new media, including The National Young Writers’ Festival, New Realities: Beyond Broadcasting for management and staff of the ABC in October 2006 and the Australian Blogging Conference in September 2007 organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation and QUT, and at their Creating Value: Between Commons and Commerce conference in June 2008. He was a panelist at the 2006 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival and an invited keynote speaker at the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism’s Public Right to Know conference in November 2007 at UTS. In 2008, he was an invited panelist at the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism event and in 2009, he was a speaker at the Brisbane Ideas Festival.
Mark was selected by the Queensland Writers Centre as one of three Wordpool lecturers on the Future of the Book in 2009, and is currently working with the Victorian Government on the digital dissemination of ideas.
In 2008, he was a semi-regular radio commentator on current affairs on 4zzz fm’s Brisbane Line program.[back to list]
Danielle Bentley
Danielle is a curator, researcher and ‘cellist.
In 2002, Danielle established Bentley’s Agency, a music business which she continues to successfully operate.
As a ‘cellist, she has worked regularly with The Queensland Orchestra and Opera Australia, and in the past 12 months, has performed and recorded with artists including Xavier Rudd, Missy Higgins, Pete Murray and Kate Miller-Heidke.
In 2006, Rockhampton City Council Arts Services sponsored Danielle to create an educational festival for children and teenagers: the Australian Music for Strings Weekend. This was followed by her most recent curatorial project, the Restrung New Chamber Festival (Brisbane Powerhouse, 28 February–02 March 2008). Restrung was a multi-art form event featuring forerunners of the Australian and international new music scenes, including artists such as the Brodsky Quartet (UK), Topology, Fourplay and CODA. Danielle commissioned the Violinarium, the world’s largest playable violin, for the festival.
Restrung was sponsored by the Brisbane Powerhouse, Australia Council and QUT, where Danielle teaches World Music, and is in the final stages of completing a PhD on festival curation. Her research focuses on exploring new ways of thinking about, marketing, and curating post-genre music in the Brisbane context, via the development of the Restrung model. Following on the success of the inaugural festival, Restrung will return in August 2010.
Danielle is a committee member of the Musicological Society of Australia, and has presented papers on the Restrung project at conferences for the Musicological Society of Australia and for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. In 2008, she was a panellist at the National Young Writers’ Festival, discussing the topic of curation. Danielle appeared as a guest lecturer in September 2008 at the University of Glamorgan in Wales. [back to list]
Linda Carroli
Linda Carroli is a writer and consultant.
Linda’s work includes community, cultural and communications consulting. With a professional interest in place, she endeavours to think and do at the intersection of planning, design, media and art. Her current writing project, Placing, funded by the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, seeks to explore ideas of place and the potential of interdisciplinary cultural practice for urban changemaking. Placing is comprised of several collaborative streams and is hosted by Harbinger Consultants, which she founded with JM John Armstrong several years ago. She is currently working in the private sector.
She is a former chair of a national art, science and technology organisation, ANAT, and was formerly the editor of an international art, science and technology electronic magazine, fineArt forum. She also edited The Ideas Book (UQP, 2005) which anthologised transcripts and papers from the 2003 and 2005 Brisbane Ideas Festivals. With more than two decades involvement in the cultural sector, predominantly in Brisbane, she has contributed to and participated in many events, organisations, publications, committees and consultations.
With cultural writings and journalism published nationally and internationally, she writes a regular column for Arts Hub exploring urban innovation and creativity. As a member of the State Government Community Forum for the Greater Brisbane Region, she has developed several proposals to the state government including the establishment of a social innovation, enterprise and design centre identifying QUT’s defunct Carseldine Campus as an appropriate site, and the integration of art-science practices in the state’s sustainability agenda. Currently undertaking postgraduate studies in planning and design, she is formulating research that is attentive to issues of suburban transformation and localisation. In 2008, she undertook a brief study tour to the UK to examine urban design, local economic development and creative industries.
As an award winning writer, she has maintained critical and experimental writing practices and continues to publish in a range of media and publications globally. During her prolonged exploration of experimental writing, her text-based works have explored online environments, public space and artists books. She is the recipient of a Centenary Medal for ‘long and distinguished service in the arts’. [back to list]
Jaz Hee-jeong Choi
Jaz is a researcher in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology.
Her research interests are in playful technology, particularly the ways in which various forms of playful interaction are designed, developed, and integrated in an Asian context.
Currently she is completing her doctoral thesis on the mobile play culture of young Koreans at the intersection of play, culture, technology, people, and urban environment.
She is also in the process of expanding her research to design and develop playful ubiquitous technologies to cultivate sustainable food culture in urban environments.
Her website is at www.nicemustard.com [back to list].
Bruce Muirhead
Professor Bruce Muirhead is CEO of Eidos Institute – a think tank and research institute with a focus on public policy.
A recent 2020 Summit participant, he has more than 20 years’ experience in building partnerships between public and private sector focusing on the connections between economic, public and social innovation in the development of community capacity at local and global levels. [back to list]
Marcus Westbury
Marcus Westbury has created some of Australia’s most innovative, unconventional and successful cultural projects and events.
Marcus has been the writer and presenter of two series of ABC TV’s Not Quite Art and his writings about art, media, culture, cities and politics have appeared in Griffith REVIEW, Meanjin, Crikey, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, several anthologies, journals, and countless web sites. He is currently a columnist for The Age.
Marcus is currently the founder and Chair of Renew Newcastle – an innovative urban renewal project that has already incubated over 25 creative enterprises and initiatives in that city’s empty shops and offices.
From 2002 to 2006 Marcus was the Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival and was a co-director the Cultural Program of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games. During that time Marcus co-founded Free Play — Australia’s largest independent computer game developers event.
In the late 90s he was the driving force behind Newcastle’s This Is Not Art festival – now Newcastle’s largest annual tourism event and one of the largest media arts events in the world. Marcus was also a manager of the Australia Council’s LOUD media festival and NOISE youth media arts festivals.
Marcus has sat on Committees of The Australia Council, Arts Victoria, NSW Ministry for the Arts, The Australian Film Commission and numerous government agencies. He is currently a member of the Federal Government’s Creative Australia advisory panel, was a 2020 Summit delegate and works part time with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT.
More information here if you need it: http://www.marcuswestbury.net/who-is-marcus/ [back to list]
