Lightning Talks: Creative Solutions for Sustainable Futures with UTS Visualisation Institute

Image credit: Holly O'Neil, observation sketchbooks, 2025

Join us for an inspiring series of lightning talks showcasing creative research projects from the UTS Visualisation Institute! 

Discover everything from community storytelling events where narratives about climate change range from cheeky to devastating; to a housing prototype protecting urban pollinators, and a collaboration between fashion and choreography exploring transformation in living systems. 

After the short talks, connect with the creative minds behind these initiatives in a networking session designed to spark collaboration and fuel new ideas. 

Don’t miss this dynamic event where creative research and sustainability collide.

Event date: Friday 14th March 2025

Event time: 11:00AM - 12:00PM

Location: University of Technology Building 6 (Peter Johnson Building), Level 6, Room 038 (CB06.06.038), 702 Harris St Ultimo NSW 2007 Map

Lightning Talks:

Dr Andrew Burrell - overGround:underStory

Gabriel Clark - Read To Me (Climate edition)

Dr Sarah Jane Jones - Rain Garden Diagramming

Holly O'Neil - Drawer Gatherer, place-based storytelling

Dr Donna Sgro - Brightness: a collaboration between fashion and choreography

Dr Zoë Sadokierski - Climate Action Interns

Dr Rafael Luna Zelaya - Wild Futures and Pollinator Architecture

Speakers:

Dr Andrew Burrell is a practice-based researcher and educator exploring virtual and digitally mediated environments as a site for the construction, experience and exploration of memory as narrative. Their ongoing research investigates the relationship between imagined and remembered narrative and how the multi-layered biological and technological encoding of human subjectivity may be portrayed within, and inform the design of, virtual environments.

Gabriel Clark is a visual communication design practitioner and academic whose expertise is in comics, graphic storytelling, motion design, digital photo media, and multi platform storytelling. He conceived and co-produces the cult graphic storytelling event Read to Me, the award-winning multimodal storytelling project Radio With Pictures, and is a co-founder of Graphic festival at the Sydney Opera House.

Dr Sarah Jane Jones is a visual communication designer and researcher with over 20 years of industry experience in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Her practice-based research explores wayfinding design approaches that draw together ecological, historical and cultural narratives, central to this is investigating the relationship between physical signage and digital wayfinding methods, and the creation of new, multi-layered and interpretive wayfinding experiences. 

Holly O'Neil is an English, Bahrain-born, Australia-based Multimodal Researcher and Anthro-Artist. Currently, she is exploring the role of graphic visual storytelling as a form of research methodology to document and engage the public with the climate crisis. She is working on her PhD at UTS, in Sydney, where she is working on an Australian Research Council-funded project, with an incredible interdisciplinary team, to "surface" the urban wetlands that the city is built on through design and research.

Dr Donna Sgro is a Lecturer in fashion and textiles design, with a background as an independent fashion designer. Her research investigates creative pattern cutting in fashion and textile design using studies from nature and methods of metaphoric analysis. Donna's fashion and textile works have been exhibited around the world, including Australia, USA, Japan, France, UK and South-east Asia. Her work is most well recognized for the Morphotex Dress, a world-first in biomimicry for structural textile colour. This work is currently on display at the Museum of Fiber Arts, Taichung.

Dr Zoë Sadokierski is a designer, writer, creative producer based at the UTS School of Design. Her practice-based research explores ways that visual communication – particularly illustrated nonfiction, data storytelling and anarchival collage – can be used to engage audiences with complex scientific and cultural issues. Her book Father, Son and Other Animals (2024) explores climate change and species extinctions through the lenses of parenting and creative practice.

Dr Rafael Luna Zelaya is the co-founder of the architecture firm PRAUD, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, and the director of the Infra-Architecture Lab. Luna is the award winner of the Architectural League Prize 2013, and his work has been exhibited at the MoMA, Venice Biennale, and Seoul Biennale. He is the co-author of I Want to Be Metropolitan, the North Korean Atlas (received the DAM award), and A Language of Contemporary Architecture: An Index of Topology and Typology.

To see all events happening at Climate Action Week Sydney 2025 click here