Creative Australia Fellowships announced

Lauren Brincat, 'Hear This', 2011, documentation of an action, single-channel High Definition video, production still. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Getting your ‘break’ as an emerging artist can be tough. Thanks to the Australia Council for the Arts, however, it just got a little bit easier.

Creative Australia Fellowships is a major new initiative to help unearth budding talent and enrich established. As part of the Federal Government’s Creative Australia Grants Initiative, $10 million will be invested into the creative arts sector over the next five years. Emerging artists are eligible for $60,000 over two years, with established artists eligible for $100,000 over the course of one year.

In its inaugural year, Australia Council for the Arts has awarded a total of 11 Fellowships to an array of artists working across a broad range of mediums.

Fellowships in the emerging category were awarded to:

Lauren Brincat (multimedia performance)
Annabel Smith (fiction writer)
Micheala Gleave (installation, performance, photography and video)
Matthew Prest (theatre maker and performer)
Lee Serie (Dancer and choreographer); and
Gian Slater (jazz vocalist, composer and lecturer).

Fellowships in the established category were awarded to:

Guy Ben-Ary (artist and researcher)
Michael Gruchy (video, film and documentary)
Anthony Hamilton (dancer and choreographer)
Cat Jones (director, writer, performer, media maker and creative producer); and
Gaelle Mellis (dance and theatre designer).

Lauren Brincat, 'This Time Tomorrow: Tempelhof', documentation of an action, single-channel High Definition video, production still. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Executive Director of Arts Funding, Libby Christie, spoke of the search for proposals that extended an artist’s artform practice through interdisciplinary approaches to creating work, and in ways that led to interesting new artistic collaborations.

With 98 applications received for the established artists fellowships and 323 for the young and emerging/early career artists fellowships, the grant initiative is in its beginning stages. We look forward to seeing how the aforementioned artists evolve and congratulate them on their success!