Linda Barwick is a researcher and writer whose interests include nurturing creativity, honouring intergenerational wisdom and promoting diversity of thought and compassionate action. She enjoys gardening, bridge, grandchildren and cats, and is Emeritus Professor at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Clint Bracknell is a Nyungar singer/song-maker from the south coast of Western Australia and Professor of Indigenous Languages at the University of Queensland. He holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Western Australia and is Deputy Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. 

Genevieve Campbell is a musician and ethnomusicologist, working with senior Tiwi song custodians in the maintenance of performative knowledge transmission. She is an Honorary Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Sydney Environment Institute, with cross-disciplinary interests in performance, eco-musicology, and the impacts of environmental and social change on embodied culture in the context of cultural maintenance, artistic creativity and community health.

Chi-Fang Chao is a senior lecturer in the Department of Dance at the University of Roehampton, London. She has been trained in anthropology and dance studies. Her research interests include the anthropological study of ritual and dance, dance ethnography in Okinawa, Japan, and reflexive/post-colonial dance theatre of Indigenous people in Taiwan. She was invited to cooperate with the Formosan Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe in producing two works of contemporary Indigenous people’s dance and music theatre: Pu’ing: Search for the Atayal Route (2013) and Ma’ataw: The Floating Island (2016), both committed by the Council of Indigenous People and premiered in the National Theatre in Taiwan.

Amanda Harris is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, and Director of the Sydney Unit of digital archive Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). Amanda is interested in hearing the voices of those often excluded from conventional music histories through collaborative research focused on gender and intercultural musical cultures. Her monograph Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930–70 was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2020.

Born in Auckland, Aotearoa, Jack Gray is a founding member and the Artistic Director of Atamira Dance Company since 2018. His independent arts practice engages diverse audiences in community-centred spaces of Indigenous knowledge exchange, such as Cultural Informance Lab (California), Transformance Lab (New York), I Moving Lab (USA, Australia, NZ), Indigenous Dance Forum (New York), I LAND (Hawaii, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, New York), Intentional Indigenous Artform Exchange (New York) and more. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of California Riverside, Artist in Residence at New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute, Regents Scholar at UCLA World Arts and Cultures/Dance. 

Cindy Jinmarabynana is a Marrarrich/Anagawbama clan woman from the An-barra language group of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. Her outstation is Ji-bena and she is a cultural manager for Gupanga. She lives in the Western Arnhem Land community of Maningrida, where she is a teacher and Lúrra Language and Culture team member at Maningrida College. She is co-chair of the Northern Land Council’s Learning on Country Steering Committee, and a director of Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation. Cindy is a dedicated mother and grandmother who is passionate about passing on language and knowledge for future generations to ensure the continuity of culture.

Jodie Kell is a PhD candidate, supervised by Professor Linda Barwick and Associate Professor Myfany Turpin. She works at PARADISEC as an audio engineer and co-producer of the podcast Toksave: Culture Talks. Her doctoral research focuses on the role of women in music making and the dynamics of gender in the music performance space through a participatory ethnography of the Ripple Effect Band – an all-women’s rock band from the Western Arnhem Land community of Maningrida of which Jodie is the band manager, co-songwriter and lead guitarist.

Matt Poll is the manager of Indigenous programs at the Australian National Maritime Museum and previously worked as Curator of Indigenous Heritage collections of the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, following more than a decade as repatriation project officer at the University of Sydney. Matt played an integral part in implementing an Acknowledgement of Country built into the architecture of the new Chau Chak Wing Museum, which opened in November 2020. Matt is also currently chairperson of Orana Arts in mid-western regional NSW and is a long-term member of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Board for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Marianne Schultz holds a MLitt and PhD in History from the University of Auckland in addition to a MA in Performing Arts from Middlesex University, London. Marianne has danced and taught professionally in the United States and New Zealand, most recently with the Foster Group’s production Orchids. She is the author of two books, Performing Indigenous Culture on Stage and Screen: A Harmony of Frenzy and Limbs Dance Company: Dance For All People. Her articles on dance and the performing arts have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and in the volume Staging the Other in Nineteenth-Century British Drama.

Jacqueline Shea Murphy is a professor in the dance department at UC Riverside, where she teaches courses in critical dance studies and in Iyengar yoga. She is author of “The People Have Never Stopped Dancing”: Native American Modern Dance Histories (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and is founder and co-director of the Indigenous Choreographers at Riverside gathering project (https://icr.ucr.edu/). Her new book, Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. It emerges out of relationships – including with Jack Gray – that have grown while she has been engaging with Native American and Indigenous dance in the US, Canada and Aotearoa over the past 20 years. 

Rosy Simas is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation. She is a transdisciplinary and dance artist who creates work for stage and installation. Simas’ work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, sovereignty, equality and healing. She creates dance work with a team of Native and BIQTPOC artists, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening. Simas is a 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Choreography Fellow, 2015 Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellow, 2017 Joyce Award recipient from The Joyce Foundation, 2019 Dance/USA Fellow, 2021 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award recipient, 2022 USA Doris Duke Fellow, 2016 and 2022 McKnight Foundation Choreography Fellow, and multiple awardee from NEFA National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and National Performance Network. Simas is the Artistic Director of Rosy Simas Danse and Three Thirty One Space, a creative studio for Native and BIPOC artists in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

Jacinta Portaminni Tipungwuti is a senior culture woman and traditional owner of the Tiwi Islands, Northern Australia. She is a custodian and composer of the songlines of Wrangku Country on western Bathurst Island, she dances Ampiji (Rainbow) and Yirrikapayi (Crocodile) and she is a senior woman of the Lorringala (Stone) Skingroup. As a member of the Tiwi Strong Women’s Group, she has performed at the Sydney and Darwin Festivals, the Sydney Opera House, the National Film and Sound Archive, and at music and language conferences around Australia.

Jakelin Troy (Jaky) is Ngarigu of the Snowy Mountains, called by Jaky’s community Kunama Namadgi, in south-eastern Australia. She is Director, Indigenous Research at The University of Sydney and founded the Sydney Indigenous Research Network (https://bit.ly/3SpWQF1). Jaky is conducting research with Linda and Amanda into the use of historical records locked in the archives to support her own and other Aboriginal communities to recover and maintain language, cultural practices, performance and music. Recently she has been working with communities in north-west Pakistan to support their cultural activism as they document and share their language, music and performance.