The Microflix Steering Committee
DEBORAH SZAPIRO
DEBORAH SZAPIRO is an award winning creative producer, curator and academic. She has an impressive track record producing innovative animation and documentary for film and television. Her work has been screened extensively by broadcasters and film festivals worldwide. Awards to films include two AFI awards, Dendy, ATOM and IF awards, the Gordon Bruce Award for Humour, The PATHE Award, The Shell Canada Award and the BANFF Television Award for Best Animated Series, among others. She was founder and Festival Director of the Japanime Film Festival, co-director of the Sydney International Animation Festival and continues to curate animation programs and events locally and internationally. More recently, Deborah has expanded her creative practice to embrace architectural projection and was creative director for X Factory Vivid 2016 on the Carlton United Brewery building at Central Park and recently transformed the gigantic wave-form rooftop of the Australian National Maritime Museum with an animated canvas that spoke of our everyday relationship with the sea. She convened a symposium and program of Indigenous Animation at ACMI in Melbourne in July 2018 and is currently Chair of the selection committee for Feature Animation for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Deborah currently lectures in animation at the University of Technology, Sydney.
RICHARD HOLT
RICHARD HOLT is a Melbourne-based writer and visual artist who has spent many years combining text with visual art, often in the public realm. He developed FLASHING THE SQUARE, a collaborative microlit project with publishing house, Spineless Wonders. The microlit screen project has now spread into venues and festivals nationally. For the past five years, Richard has been delivering microfiction seminars within RMIT’s Professional Writing & Editing Diploma. He’s a current recipient of a Creative Learning Partnership (Creative Victoria, 2018) with St Kilda Park Primary School, delivering a three month intensive microfiction project for over thirty Year 5 boys. He has delivered numerous community writing workshops, most recently for Port Phillip and Eastern Region Library Services in 2018, teaching budding writers of all ages. He designed and ran ‘Write Off’ physical writing programs with Ringwood Secondary College (2016 & 2017), in conjunction with the Realm Text Incubator series. He has also managed youth arts projects in the visual arts, including the Render Street Art Project funded by the Victorian Department of Justice in 2016. http://bigstorysmall.com
CASSANDRA ATHERTON
CASSANDRA ATHERTON is Associate Professor at Deakin University in Writing and Literature. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in English in 2016 and a Visiting Professor at Sophia University, Tokyo in 2014. She has published 17 books and is the recipient of many grants and prizes, most recently a VicArts grant and Australia Council grant. She has judged the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, the Lord Mayor’s Prize for Poetry and The joanne burns Award for Microliterature since 2016 and is the is the current poetry editor of Westerly Magazine. An accomplished prose poet, Cassandra is one of Australia’s leading experts in the microliterary form and has published papers and addressed international conferences on both digital writing and multiplatform publishing.
BRONWYN MEHAN
BRONWYN MEHAN is the founder of the Australian short fiction publishing house, Spineless Wonders and she oversees the print, digital, audio and performance activities of the press. She champions the microliterature form in Australia and her press has hosted The
If you would like to join our Steering Committee, please contact info@microflixfestival.com.au