Paul Barclay - Presenter, Big Ideas, ABC

Bruce Pascoe - Author, Dark Emu

Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong, Tasmanian and Yuin man born in Melbourne who grew up on a remote island in Bass Strait and had a joey and a dog as pets. He lives in Gipsy Point in Victoria, where he has two children, three grandchildren and two dogs, Yambulla and Wangarabel.

Bruce’s books for children include Foxies in a Firehose (2006), Seahorse (2015) and Fog a Dox, which won the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award (YA Fiction). His children’s book, Mrs Whitlam (2016), was shortlisted in the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s (CBCA) 2017 Book of the Year Awards in the Younger Readers category. 

Bruce is a prolific writer and has written more than 20 books, including short story collections Night Animals (1986) and Nightjar (2000); the novels Fox (1988), Ruby Eyed Coucal (1996), Ribcage (1999), Shark (1999), Earth (2001), Ocean (2002), and Bloke (2009); and historical works Cape Otway: Coast of Secrets (1997) and Convincing Ground (2007). His non-fiction book, Dark Emu (2014) continues to go into reprint and won the Book of the Year and Indigenous Writer’s Prize in the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. A children’s version of Dark Emu will be published by Magabala Books in 2018.

Lissa Twomey - Executive Director, Major Performing Arts and Artistic Development, Australia Council for the Arts

Lissa Twomey is Executive Director, Major Performing Arts and National Engagement at the Australia Council for the Arts and the former Festival Director of the New Zealand International Arts Festival and Associate Director of Sydney Festival. She was instrumental in setting up the inaugural Wellington Jazz Festival and has extensive multi-arts experience and knowledge of international and Australian arts and culture. Lissa has worked for more than 20 years in the arts industry in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Whilst Lissa trained as a classical pianist, she is driven by her passion as an arts administrator to work with artists and organisations to realise their artistic goals and ambitions.

Lucinda Hartley - Co-Founder, Neighbourlytics; 2018 Myer Innovation Fellow; 2018 Westpac Social Change Fellow

Lucinda is an urban designer and social entrepreneur who has spent the past decade pioneering innovative methods to improve the social sustainability of cities, now being implemented around the world.

As a co-founder at Neighbourlytics, she bring her social innovation and entrepreneurship strengths to harness big data, and deliver community insights that inform evidence-based urban development decisions. Neighbourlytics is backed by BlueChilli Group’s highly competitive She Starts program.

Previously, as CoFounder at CoDesign Studio Lucinda spearheaded new, community-led approaches to neighbourhood building based on human centred design, that are now proven on 50 neighbourhood renewal projects across Australia.

CoDesign's flagship program The Neighbourhood Project, puts this into action at-scale, enabling governments and communities to systemically change the way they create neighbourhoods . Here she has leveraged her capabilities in designing and delivering cross-sector partnerships to secure major multi-year support from The Myer Foundation and Resilient Melbourne (part of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities Program).

Globally, she spent two years in south-east Asia delivering low-cost slum improvement strategies prior to launching CoDesign Studio. More recently, Lucinda's urban insights contributed to UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 (Cities) and she was elected to the UN-Habitat Youth Advisory Board for five years.

Named as one of Melbourne’s Top 100 most influential people in 2012 by The Age newspaper, Lucinda has gained widespread recognition. Most recently, CoDesign was named as one of Westpac’s inaugural 2017 Businesses of Tomorrow.

Lucinda doesn't separate her work and personal life: first we shape our cities, then they shape us.

Shakthidharan Sivanathan - Founder, CuriousWorks; Artistic Director, Co-Curious

Shakthi is a western Sydney storyteller with Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry. He’s a writer, director and producer of film and theatre, and composer of original music as one half of the band Kurinji. Recent projects include his debut play, Counting and Cracking, which recently completed a sold out season to rave reviews at the 2019 Sydney Festival, with Belvoir; Laka, a multi-platform film and VR project touring around the world, from Brewarrina to Los Angeles; and Rizzy’s 18th Birthday Party, which premiered at Carriageworks in 2014 and was adapted into feature film Riz for the 2015 Sydney Film Festival. Both Laka and Counting and Cracking form part of Shakthi's Colony body of work, a universe of interconnected stories stretching from before colonisation through to an imagined 22nd century. Shakthi is the current Artistic Director of Co-Curious. Co-Curious is a sister company to CuriousWorks, where Shakthi was the Founder and Artistic Director from 2003-2018. Shakthi was the inaugural Associate Artist at Carriageworks and is the recipient of the Phillip Parson’s and Kirk Robson awards.