Michelle is a novelist and lecturer in Advertising at RMIT. Her research interests include: postcolonial literary theory, in particular the ‘limit’; writing collaboration in social enterprise; the mobile phone and writers in Myanmar. She is currently working on her second book, researched during an Asialink Residency in 2014 (funded by Arts Victoria) which explores the limits of identity in contemporary Myanmar and cosmopolitan, colonial Rangoon.

Ali Barker has worked at RMIT since 2011 on projects including the major international literary events NonfictioNOW and the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange Program (WrICE). Ali is an experienced arts manager with communications, policy, project management, strategy and marketing experience. Ali has worked at Writing WA, the Barbican Centre, the V&A, Lyric Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, Circus Oz and Victorian Opera. Ali also lectures in the Master of Arts and Cultural Management at Melbourne University and has worked with Creative Victoria on industry related projects. Ali is the recipient of a Victorian State Government Women’s Board Leadership scholarship for 2018.

Ben Byrne is a scholar, musician and curator who explores sonic art, media and culture through technology, engaging the complexities of identity, media and environment. He is a Lecturer in Digital Media at RMIT University. He is also the founder and director of Avantwhatever.

Hannah’s project-based research is developing models for interactive documentary specific to the affordances of the network. Hannah is specifically interested in how aesthetic noticing, listing, and multilinear structures of documentary film practice find rhythms with the mess of the everyday. Hannah has presented at the Australian Screen Production and Education Research Association annual conference, The World Cinema and the Essay Film Conference, the Digital Cultures Research Centre and is currently working on a chapter for a forthcoming anthology on interactive documentary. Hannah was a visiting PhD scholar with Dr. Kate Nash at the University of Leeds during 2015.

David Carlin is a writer, director, and creative arts researcher, based in Melbourne, Australia. David’s nonfiction books include the forthcoming The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, Our Father Who Wasn’t There, and The Abyssinian Contortionist. His essays, plays, radio features, exhibitions, documentary and short films have won awards and featured at numerous international festivals, and his recent collaborative projects include the Circus Oz Living Archive and WrICE. He is Co-President of the NonfictioNOW Conference, a founding Contributing Editor of Speculative Nonfiction, and Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University where he co-directs the non/fictionLab.

Dr Bonny Cassidy is a poet, critic, editor and essayist. She is Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University and supervises Honours and HDR candidates. Bonny has released three poetry collections: a chapbook, Said To Be Standing (Vagabond, 2010); and two full-length collections, Certain Fathoms (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012) and Final Theory (Giramondo, 2014). Her poetry has been featured in Young Poets: An Australian Anthology (John Leonard Press, 2011) and Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems from 2010-2013, with both poetry and criticism published widely in journals both local and international, including Jacket2, Meanjin, The Age, The Australian and Zone.

Vicki Couzens is a Keerray Woorroong woman from the Western Districts of Victoria. Vicki has worked in Aboriginal community affairs for almost 40 years. She is a Senior Knowledge Holder for Possum Skin Cloak Story and Language Reclamation and Revival in her Gunditjmara Mother Tongue. Vicki’s contributions in the reclamation, regeneration and revitalisation of cultural knowledge and practices extend across the ‘arts and creative cultural expression’ spectrum including language research and community development.Vicki completed her PhD in 2017 and is a Vice Chancellor Indigenous Research Fellow at RMIT.

Sophie Cunningham is an RMIT Adjunct Professor collaborating with the non/fictionLab. Sophie is a highly respected writer, editor and publisher. She has been active in the publishing industry for thirty years, as a book editor and publisher, and as author of four books (two of fiction, Geography and Bird, and two of nonfiction, Melbourne and Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy). She is a founding member of the Stella Prize, a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing that champions diversity and cultural change.

Linda Daley is a senior lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University where she teaches literary studies and supervises HDR writing projects. Linda’s research is at the intersection of philosophy and literary and cultural studies. Her work has been published in internationally respected journals including Australian Feminist Studies, Australian Feminist Law Journal, New Writing, Film-Philosophy and Third Text. 

Melody Ellis is a writer and early-career academic. She completed her undergraduate studies in fine art at Sydney College of the Arts and a doctorate in creative writing at RMIT University.
Her interdisciplinary writing practice—including fiction, narrative nonfiction and criticism—explores an interest in ‘negative’ affect, praxis, aesthetics and critical theory.

Else Fitzgerald is the non/fictionLab coordinator. Else is an Arts Programmer with many years experience working in the Australian literary sector. She was previously the Program Manager for the Emerging Writers’ Festival and Melbourne Knowledge Week, and has worked with various literary organisations including Melbourne Writers Festival and Writers Victoria.

Dr Smiljana Glisovic’s research is located in the field of documentary and poetic forms of audiovisual practice. Her research interrogates how moving image and sound can act as conduits toward affective and transformative experiences; how this practice can be used as a methodology
toward an ‘other’ kind of ‘knowledge’ of environments; and how this form can facilitate unique expressions of experience of place. She has worked across various mediums and forms, as an artist, actor, writer and filmmaker. She works at RMIT University in the School of Media and Communication where she teaches in Creative Writing and Media. This work intersects with her other practice in the field of Oriental Therapies.

Guggenheim Fellowship winner Robin Hemley is a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, who is currently Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Writing Program at Yale-NUS in Singapore, and was previously Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at University of Iowa. Robin has published 12 books of nonfiction and fiction.

Seth Keen is a media educator, researcher and award-winning designer with a record of collaborating on transdisciplinary research, not-for-profit and public sector projects. He is skilled in nonfiction, audiovisual media design that includes working with emerging web and mobile media technologies. Transdisciplinary collaborations include codesigning projects within the areas of disaster resilience, Indigenous self-determination, cultural geography, community services and development aid.

Sophie Langley is an essayist and radio maker with an interest in food, environment, waste, making, posthumanism and social practice. She is a Masters by Research candidate in the non/fictionLab. Her research explores through a series of sonic essays the value in practices of making things using food scraps as materials.

Tresa LeClerc is a higher degree by research candidate at RMIT, where she is working on a Creative Writing research project as part of her PhD Media and Communication. She also holds a MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from the University of Melbourne. Her undergraduate degree is in English Literature from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), during which time she did a year-long stint at University College Dublin (UCD) studying Irish Literature.

Julienne van Loon is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of three novels, most recently the critically acclaimed Harmless (2013). Her first novel, Road Story (2005), won The Australian/Vogel’s award and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best First Book) as well as the WA Premier’s Award for Fiction. Her first major work of non-fiction, a feminist philosophy project titled The Thinking Woman, will be published by New South Books in 2019.

Karli Lukas is a filmmaker, writer, cinema critic and curator who is interested in how ethics and memory arising from sustained immersion in built and natural landscape influence personal documentary filmmaking practice. Her PhD working title is Essaying the Asylum: From Documentary Practice to Embodied Vision. This research explores her personal connections to Australia’s longest continually operating psychiatric asylum – the now abandoned Royal Derwent Hospital in New Norfolk, Tasmania. Using essaying as method, Karli is exploring how her experiences on site have influenced her filmmaking decisions while trying to make an essay film about the site since its closure in 2001.

Brigid Magner is a literary studies scholar and non fiction writer. She is completing a book about literary places in Australia and working on a reader’s history of the Victorian Mallee (with Emily Potter). Brigid runs the Writing Writing shut up & write sessions on Mondays and Creative WorkShop every month.

Stefanie Markidis is a writer and researcher with an interest in embodiment and creative-critical practice. With a background in dance and journalism, her work has appeared in journals, magazines and on stage. Stefanie is completing a creative writing PhD at RMIT University, through which she is exploring various forms of life writing at the intersection of embodiment and language. Stefanie is a coordinator of the non/fictionLab’s present tense lecture series and the HDRLab. 

Rose is a writer, editor and academic who has been published in Griffith Review, Best Australian Stories, Island, Cultural Studies Review, Review of Australian Fiction, Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, Overland. Her first novel, The Asking Game (Transit Lounge, 2007), was a runner-up for the Vogel award and received an Aurealis honourable mention. An early extract from her second, The Art of Navigation (UWA, 2017), was shortlisted for a Conjure award.

Stephanie Milsom is a self-obsessed artist and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. Her research explores the autobiographical potential of computational processes. She is forever chasing lost time.

Kim Munro is in her final year of a practice-led PhD around voice, listening and documentary film. Kim is also a documentary filmmaker, artist and educator. She teaches film production at Swinburne University and also in the Master of Media and Bachelor of Media and Communication at RMIT. Her research and teaching interests are around socially engaged practices, non-linear, experimental, collaborative and participatory documentary projects and the intersection between theory and practice.

Peta Murray is a writer, dramaturge, teacher and newly appointed Vice Chancellor’s postdoctoral research fellow at RMIT. As a researcher, she is interested in the application of transdisciplinary and arts-based practices as modes of inquiry and as forms of cultural activism. Her practice-led PhD project, ‘Essayesque dismemoir: w/rites of elder-flowering’ employed variations of the ‘performance essay’ to devise playful and participatory nonfiction on themes of the creative life course and the embodied experience of ageing.

Tracy O’Shaughnessy is currently Program Manager of RMIT’s Master of Writing and Publishing. In 2016, she established RMIT’s Bowen Street Press, a student-led publishing house that forms the backbone of the Master of Writing and Publishing.

Wil Polson is a photographic artist, researcher and educator from Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on queer and new materialist philosophies, Wil is interested in the shift that occurs as the materials of the world collaborate with, and are transformed by, the materials of photography. Wil is approaching his final year of a practice-led PhD that interrogates notions of historical background, inherited memories and the processes involved in becoming photographic self-portraits.

Francesca Rendle-Short is Associate Dean Writing and Publishing in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing, co-founder of non/fictionLab and co-director of WrICE, the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program.

Dr. Toni Roberts is a designer and artist whose work focuses on shaping experiential, spatial and material environments that communicate ideas and values to audiences. Toni is the Program Manager of the Bachelor of Communication Design and supervises postgraduate students in design and related fields, with a particular interest in designing for experience.

Dr Ronnie Scott is Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT. In 2007 he founded The Lifted Brow, an independent magazine that he edited and published for its first five years. He is a contributor to many local and international newspapers, journals and magazines, and writes frequently for ABC Radio National, Fairfax and the NGV.

Lucinda Strahan is a writer and journalist with an ongoing interest in visual languages and hybrid forms. She has published extensively on visual art and culture in newspapers, magazines and arts journals, and her experimental literary-visual works have been shown in the exhibitions Girls! Girls! Girls! (2008) and Writing Naked (2009).

Dr Stayci Taylor is an Industry Fellow with the Media program. She has published on screenwriting practice, script development, gender, comedy, creative writing, celebrity studies and digital media in books and journals including TEXT, New Writing and Senses of Cinema. In 2017 she was co-editor of two special journal issues, including one on script development for the Journal of Screenwriting. Stayci was a regular contributor to the Grain of Truth podcast, and plays ukulele in musical comedy trio Queen Beaver. She is working with fellow non/fictionLabbers on a range of projects, including the Symphony of Awkward, which investigates the performance culture around childhood and teenage diaries.

Deborah Wardle is a third year PhD candidate in Creative Writing. She has fiction and non-fiction stories published by Spinifex Press, Meanjin, Overland, The Big Issue, Castlemaine Independent and Palliative Care Australia’s online journal E-Hospice. She has peer-reviewed articles in Australian and international journals including Meniscus, Mosaic, Fusion, and Animal Studies Journal. Her short story ‘Love Letters’ was shortlisted for the Josephine Ulrick Prize in 2016.

Paul White is researching how generative text systems can influence creative nonfiction writing. He has an extensive artistic practice covering small press publishing, literary collage, zines, animation, digital poetry and site specific street art. His research-based PhD is focused on examining the kinds of texts nonfiction writers might produce using generative systems and processes. It also will examine the ways in which generative text systems and ideas from computational creativity might help nonfiction writers reimagine the boundaries of what is possible within their own practice.

Jessica Wilkinson is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry. Her first book, a poetic biography, Marionette: A Biography of Miss Marion Davies (Vagabond 2012), was shortlisted for the 2014 Kenneth Slessor Award. She has collaborated with composer Simon Charles on a performance of Marionette for voice, music and sound, an album of which will be released in 2018. Her second poetic biography was Suite for Percy Grainger (Vagabond 2014), a poem from which won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. She is currently writing up a third, on choreographer George Balanchine. Jessica co-edited, with Bonny Cassidy, the anthology Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers, 2016). She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.