2026 Showcasing Indigenous Scholarship in Creative Industries

Presenters

• More details about Nicole Reilly

  Nicole Reilly

  Nicole Reilly is a Wiradyuri yinaa, artist, performer, creative producer and director working across contemporary performance and First Nations cultural practice. Nicole is a Senior Producer at BlakDance, where she leads the development and touring of ambitious new works by First Nations choreographers. Recent projects include the national tour of Garabari, which featured a season at Sydney Opera House as part of Sydney Festival, and Preparing Ground, presented at Brisbane Festival, a large-scale initiative supporting artistic development, community engagement and First Nations-led cultural governance. She has presented nationally at Drama Queensland, Drama Territory, Drama Australia, Stage Queensland and StageCon, and internationally supporting First Nations Dialogues at tanzmesse. Nicole completed a Master of Philosophy at Queensland University of Technology in 2024. Her research, Waganha Winhanga-gigu: Dancing for the Purpose of Remembering, centers creative practice as a methodology for cultural continuity and nation rebuilding.

• More details about Megan Albany

  Megan Albany

  Megan is a proud Kalkadoon woman living on the traditional lands of the Widjabul Wia-bal people on the unceded lands of the Bundjalung Nation. Megan has worked as an editor, scriptwriter, songwriter/composer, and journalist. She was a writer and editor for Deadly Vibe magazine; the founding editor of InVibe magazine for Indigenous youth in custody; and was a researcher for Can It Hurt Less?, an SBS documentary into Australia's juvenile justice system. For five years, she was part of the scriptwriting team for the Deadly Awards (the Deadlys), the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music, Sport, Arts and Community Awards, which screened on SBS TV, and was one of the founding concept developers for the NITV health programs Living Strong and Move It Mob Style. Her debut novel, published by Hachette Australia, The Very Last List of Vivian Walker, was shortlisted for The Banjo Prize in 2020 and highly commended in the Australian Society of Authors 2020 Award Mentorship Program. Megan recently submitted her thesis for her PhD in the School of Creative Practice at QUT. Her thesis, ‘Just Gammin: Humour, Affect and Straight-Talk in the Fiction of Melissa Lucashenko’, examines how humour functions as an affective strategy of resistance and emotional sovereignty. Her novel, Ten, submitted as part of her PhD, uses humour to interrogate the justice system's continuing incarceration of children as young as ten. In her presentation, Megan will be exploring how gammin humour emerges as a cultural throughline in First Nations fiction, offering a means to carry pain, unsettle colonial framings and reorient affect towards resilience and love. She will also be reading an excerpt from her black comedy novel, Ten, which explores the incarceration of children as young as ten, which was completed as part of her PhD

• More details about Boneta-Marie Mabo

  Boneta-Marie Mabo

  Boneta-Marie Mabo is a Nywaigi, Meriam, Manbarra and South Sea Islander woman, a visual artist, costume designer, and community practitioner. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Deakin University and has worked alongside criminalised girls for over 15 years using community arts projects as abolition in practice. Her practice is grounded in themes of resistance, identity, memory and ongoing colonialism. Boneta-Marie’s work interrogates the carceral systems of so-called Queensland, with a particular focus on the impact of girls. She critically questions how we arrived at a system that so readily criminalises and imprisons children, especially First Nations girls. She is currently showcasing her work in the National Gallery of Victoria Future Country exhibition. A work called Colonial Threads reveals how the Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act 1865 turned care into punishment, exposing colonial erasure while asserting survival and sovereignty.