Liang Luscombe’s artistic practice encompasses puppetry and moving image that engage in a process of generative questioning of how images and film affect audiences. She received her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA and is PhD candidate in Fine Art at Monash University. She has been included in screenings at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Artists Space, NYC; The Capitol, Melbourne; Table, Chicago; The Sunview Luncheonette NYC; ACMI, Melbourne; Composite, Melbourne; and the 51st Athens International Film + Video Festival. She has undertaken residencies at Rimbun Dahan, Kuala Lumpur, 2025; Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, Fremantle, 2025; Lemony S Puppetry Development Lab, Melbourne, 2024; EXPAND Adelaide Film Festival Lab, Adelaide, 2023; Bemis Center of Contemporary Arts, 2022; Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH residency program, Chicago, 2019; SOMA Summer, Mexico City, 2018; Australia Council Studio, British School at Rome, 2013; and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Studio Residency, Perth, 2011.
Isobel D’Cruz Barnes is a Malaysian-Australian musician and ethnomusicologist based between Narrm/Melbourne AU and the Lenapehoking/Philadelphia US. She writes on race, post-colonial theory and subculture and performs/composes as Hantu. Her research has been published in Context Journal of Music Research and presented in-person with the International Society for the Study of Popular Music (Australia and New Zealand), Writing & Concepts, Bus Projects and unProjects. In music performance, she has been awarded Best Live Bassist by the National Live Music Awards (2018) and has been nominated for the Australian Music Prize (2019), the Music Victoria Awards (2019, 2024) and the Australian Independent Records Association Awards (2019). She is currently undertaking her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.
Haneen Mahmood Martin is a Kuala Lumpur born, Malay-Saudi multi-arts programmer, producer, writer, and artist based between Narrm/Melbourne, Garramilla/Darwin, and Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide. She works with a focus on best-practice engagement and ethical governance as it pertains to underrepresented migrant and PoC communities and building sustained relationships. She is determined in her analysis of how and why structures are developed, and how they can become sustainable for generations to come.
Haneen has worked across the country and across art forms as a producer for the likes of Performing Lines, RISING, Biennale of Sydney, MPavilion, Regional Arts Australia, Darwin Fringe, and Next Wave, as a programmer as the inaugural Artistic Associate at Brown’s Mart, Manager of the National Young Writers Festival, and General Manager for Skinnyfish Music. She co-wrote the Engage! Report and Toolkit published by Contemporary Asian Australian Performance and Arts on Tour and holds an MFA (Cultural Leadership) from NIDA.
In her own time, Haneen manages a director for Malay and Malaysian creatives in Australia and hosts the Sayang-Sayang Supper Club - an opportunity to test Malaysian recipes and notions of hospitality right from her home in Melbourne.
Janette Hoe (Performer & Choreographer) is a Melbourne-based dance artist whose work draws the body, memory, and place into conversation. Through movement, gesture, materiality, and mark-making, she engages the body as a living archive. Drawing on her Malaysian-Chinese-Indonesian heritage, her practice spans over three decades of site-specific work grounded in Butoh and Eastern and Western somatic improvisation.
Her work unfolds in public spaces, galleries, and natural environments — continually expanding the conditions under which dance can be encountered. She collaborates across disciplines with artists and designers from diverse backgrounds, and as a facilitator leads EveryBODY Dance — a project that opens collective conversation around movement and place for young people with little or no dance training. KuehLapis is her current long-term research container: an autobiographical inquiry into the ageing body at significant thresholds in a woman's life, tracing unpredictability, vulnerability, and belonging.
Bronwen Kamasz (Puppeteer & Puppet Devising) is a Naarm-based multi-disciplinary artist working collaboratively across the visual and performing arts with a focus on embodied, sensory and site-responsive works. For In Shadows (Dalam Bayang-Bayang), Bronwen draws on her experience as a puppeteer, a dancer with a practice steeped in Body Weather and as a co-devisor of performance works. Bronwen is a member of immersive puppet theatre company Golden Scissor Puppets and site-specific performance art company Environmental Performance Authority. In Shadows is Bronwen’s third project working with artist Liang Luscombe.
Vanessa Ellis (Puppeteer) is a puppeteer, designer, and maker working at the intersection of movement, material, and story. With a background in dance and over 25 years in visual theatre, she creates, builds, and performs puppetry for stage, film, and television.
Working across intimate and large-scale forms — including body, rod, shadow, marionette, tabletop, and animatronics — Vanessa’s practice spans independent and collaborative projects presented nationally and internationally. For seven years she served as Head of Puppetry with AIME Mentoring, designing puppetry for live performance and film, creating over 50 Muppet-style puppets for performers and staff internationally, and leading training and mentoring with Australian Indigenous staff and children, using puppetry as a tool for connection, storytelling, and cultural exchange. She has worked with companies including Bangarra Dance Theatre, Victorian Opera, Opera Australia, Windmill Theatre, Patch Theatre, Polyglot Theatre, and The Creature Technology Company, and toured internationally with Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular.
Hantu (Music) is the project of Philadelphia-based, Malaysian-Australian musician and ethnomusicologist Isobel D’Cruz Barnes. Drawing on her Western (flute) and Indian (bansuri) Classical training, Hantu's sound world comprises field recordings, post-minimalist soundscapes and improvisation informed by spiritual jazz. Following an incendiary Melbourne debut in 2022, Hantu's distinctive sound has graced venues and festivals across Australia, and has been featured on international platforms such as NTS Radio and The Wire Magazine. Hantu’s Melbourne/Narrm ensemble features long-time collaborators Zachary Schneider (guitar/synth), Rama Parwata (percussion/suling), Genevieve Fry (harp/recorder) and Tom Flenady (double bass).