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Prima Donna is a series of sonic portraits of Australian artists. Composer Nat Grant captures interviews with practitioners from all disciplines. The portraits comprise interview recordings collaged with Nat’s original compositions: telling these artists’ stories, in their own words. They are both oral history and sonic artwork.
The podcast episodes are available via podbean, Spotify and iTunes. |
Joyce McGrath OAMPortrait Painter. Churchill Fellow.
Arts Librarian at the State Library of Victoria. |
Robin LauriePerformance and circus artist. Circus Oz, Victorian Women's Circus, Soapbox Circus, The Pram Factory.
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Photo by Dagmara Gieysztor
Sandra ShotlanderFeminist playwright. The Plantagenets. Mime and Mumbles deaf theatre company.
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Jo Jo SmithSoul singer, songwriter. First woman to perform at Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival.
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Shirley McKechnie OAM, AO, FAHADancer, choreographer, educator. Founded the first tertiary dance course in Australia.
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Photo by Sandy Edwards
Elizabeth DrakeFilm composer, pianist. First (and only) woman to win an AFI for screen composition.
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Percussionist, Board Member of the Victorian Women's Trust, Vice President Philanthropy Australia
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Artistic Director La Mama Theatre, Teacher, Actor
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Actor, director, writer, stand-up comedian
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First female lighting designer and stage manager in Australia. General Manager, Victorian Arts Centre. Artistic Director: Melbourne Festival, Adelaide Festival of the Arts.
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Folk singer. Performed at the first National Folk Festival. First Lifetime Achievement recipient at the inaugural Australian Women In Music Awards in 2018
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Documentary filmmaker. Indigenous rights activist. Made the first film on black deaths in custody. First Indigenous person on the Australian Film Council.
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Animator and educator Cath Murphy has a rich history in animation spanning more than 20 years and has won numerous awards in film for: Animation; Writing; Directing; Producing and Visual Effects.
A registered nurse with extensive experience in mental health, Cath’s approach to animation is about social inclusion and the impact it can have on working and emotional life. |
Lella Cariddi is a writer/researcher of community history, curator of contemporary art, documentary producer, installation artist, adult educator and Community Cultural Development Practitioner; committed to the advancement of literatures and the Arts as a vehicle for intergenerational social inclusion between mainstream Australian Society and immigrants & refugees.
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Jean Taylor is a lesbian feminist writer, publisher and activist who lives on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung country in Bulleke-bek Naarm. She has been a member of various feminist activist collectives in the Women's Liberation Movement since the early 1970s and was a founding member of the Performing Older Women's Circus (POW) for women over 40.
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Photo by Jody Haines
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Peta Murray is a recovering playwright, best known for her plays Wallflowering and Salt. A late-blooming academic, she is also a Lecturer in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University where she writes extravaganzas with preposterous titles, performs essays, coins neologisms, collaborates on loopy approaches to memoir, queers the q(a)antata, and makes mischief with The Symphony of Awkward as they stake claim to world domination in the emergent discourse of diarology.
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Elizabeth Russell-Arnot is an inquisitive adventurer with academic credentials across multiple arts disciplines. Her Churchill Fellowship and 2 Masters Degrees in the Arts have led to a focus on our endangered environment expressed through creativity in writing, illustrating, painting and sculpture. Liz has always been aware of the world in which she lives and her artistic work became the voice which she used to express her love for the environment and everything in it: birds, animals, insects, plants and yes, even mankind.
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Jane Murphy considers herself to be an “Accidental Property Master”.
She stumbled across a role in a film art department in the mid 1980’s in Sydney. Her love of stories & people, combined with a fascination of things, has proved the perfect marriage for her role of Props Master for film, TV and theatre. |
Julie Peters
Julie Peters grew up in the 1950s, way before trans was generally heard of, let alone understood. As a child she had difficulty working out why people insisted she was a boy when she knew she was a girl. She affirmed her gender in 1990. Julie has been activist off and on since the early 1980s. Her activism has involved being out in the
workplace, slide shows, performance, readings, running for Parliament, engaging with health workers, lawyers, police, academic lecturing and research. |
Alma Quon
Jazz drummer and bandleader Alma Quon was born in 1911 and died in 2007. Her ensemble The Joybelles comprising women from a range of cultural backgrounds was active from the 1940s until the 1990s.
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Wilma Tabacco was born in Italy, and lives in Australia
Wilma uses abstract iconography to refer to aspects of Italian cultural history, archaeological artefacts found in ancient ruins and she ‘maps’ ground plans of architectural spaces. She has presented 45 solo exhibitions since 1988, in Australia, Italy and Korea and participated in over 250 group exhibitions, including in New York, Dubai, London, Seoul, Paris, Edinburgh. |
This project is supported by Creative Partnerships Australia through the Australian Cultural Fund. |
This project is supported by the Sustaining Creative Workers Initiative. |
