Team
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Claire Watson
she/her
Director, NETS Victoria
Secretary, Board of ManagementClaire Watson is a passionate contributor to the arts community through her role on boards and advisory committees, as a judge for industry prizes, a writer, and lecturer. Her professional experience includes serving as an advisor on the Touring Panel for Creative Victoria (2014-2016), board member of the Public Galleries Association of Victoria (2017-2019) chairing their Advocacy and Research Committee; and a range of senior roles at arts organisations including BLINDSIDE, Asialink, Gippsland Art Gallery, and Bundoora Homestead Art Centre. Claire has curated over 100 exhibitions including the Artspace Mackay touring exhibition Violent Salt co-curated with Yhonnie Scarce; NETS Victoria/BLINDSIDE touring exhibition Synthetica (2015-2016); and the Asialink/BLINDSIDE touring exhibition Vertigo (2014). She has been a guest speaker at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei; Galerie Soemardja, Indonesia; and the TransCultural Exchange Conference, USA. Claire is an Affiliate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, a member of the National Association of Visual Arts, an advocate for inclusive practices and a lover of innovation.
Photograph: Kate Longley
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Zoë Bastin
she/her
Manager, Partnerships and CommunicationsZoë Bastin is an artist whose expanded choreographic practice considers exhibition, installation, publishing and performance as part of the same political project – the reorganisation of societal structures that limit bodies.
Zoë considers situations, movements and objects as connected in artistic production. Her projects operate within academic, gallery, theatre and public art realms traversing various artistic modes. This practice emerged during visual art studies (BFA, Hon, PhD) considering the sculptural potential of the physical body. She studied, then later taught, at Mangala Studios in Carlton, an important site in the lineage of Australian German Expressionist Dance (est.1970). In recent years her research has become increasingly interested in the complexity of practices, ideologies, and aesthetic modes of making within settler Australian legacies of dance and their intersection with visual art.
Zoë completed a PhD at RMIT University in 2021. She has previously exhibited and performed at the Villa Lena Foundazione, Chunky Move, Bus Projects, Dancehouse, Midsumma Festival, Felt Space, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Seventh Gallery, Testing Grounds, BLINDSIDE, Bloc Projects, KINGS Artist Run, MADA Gallery at Monash University, Project Space at RMIT University, and The Substation.
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Chantelle Mitchell
she/her
Exhibitions CoordinatorChantelle Mitchell is a researcher, arts administrator and curator with experience across public, university and artist run organisations. Her research interests across the arts and humanities include extraction, temporality, and affect. Chantelle’s experience across the contemporary arts sphere extends to positions with Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, SEVENTH Gallery and the University of Melbourne. She has also held roles on the boards of SEVENTH Gallery and BLINDSIDE ARI. She was previously a predoctoral researcher with the University of Vienna, during which she presented and published new research considering entanglements of air, crisis and contemporary philosophy.
Chantelle maintains an ongoing artistic and research-based practice with Jaxon Waterhouse, Ecological Gyre Theory. Together, they consider questions of environment, temporality, scale and place working with plants, animals and ecologies in thinking through relations. They have produced texts for Green Letters, Performance Philosophy, e-flux and unMagazine, and have presented their work nationally and internationally. In 2023 they are Curators in Residence at Monash Universities’ MADA Gallery.