Meet the teAm

Andraya is a Māori-Dutch woman, secondary English teacher, and PhD candidate at the University of Canberra, Faculty of Arts and Design. Her writing is a thought experiment in ‘making stories’ with rabbits using feminist multispecies theory (Haraway 2016) and Indigenous epistemology (Yunkaporta 2019). Through processes of ‘becoming-with’ and ‘making-with’ rabbits, Andraya strives to foreground the role of human and nonhuman connectedness in processes of creativity. Andraya lives with seven companion house rabbits who are her kin. She is writing a novel (with rabbits) called Rabbit Island.

Emma Phillips is a photographer, educator and practice-led researcher. Her work focuses on the ways that image-making might be informed by classist, racist and gendered assumptions. Emma has twelve years professional photography experience in Australian media, design and advertising and eight years experience teaching in photography and visual communications programs across Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. She has been a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize and the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize and completed her PhD, on women and self-representation, in 2022 with UTS. She has taught extensively with RMIT Photography and is currently an assistant professor in Visual Communication at the University of Canberra.

Irfan Master is an award-winning author of novels, shorts stories, poetry and plays. His debut novel, A Beautiful Lie, (Bloomsbury, 2011) was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book prize and the Branford Boase award for debut authors and translated into ten languages. 

Irfan is a passionate advocate for creative projects in the community and has developed programmes and mentored young people in how to gain access to the creative arts. He has worked with English PEN, the British Council and the Arvon Foundation to deliver writing workshops and has worked as writer-in-residence for the writing charity First Story since 2011. Irfan has been an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at London Metropolitan University and is currently a PhD student and teacher within the Faculty of Arts and Design, UC.  

Rik (Richard) Lagarto began his professional career as a theatre director specialising in co-devised performance works that explored themes of cultural identity, colonisation and racism. After 12 years Rik moved into game development as a game designer, eventually specialising in narrative design and writing. Rik has worked on titles such as the Total War series, Star Wars: Republic Heroes, Bioshock 2, Yonder and Café Rescue Merge. Rik has had several fantasy short stories published and is currently working as a lecture in digital media, while continuing work on his creative led PhD in Creative Writing & Interactive Fiction, examining steampunk and post colonialism. 

  Bilquis is Lecturer in Arts at UC and she was Head of Inclusion at Sydney Opera House prior to returning to academia.   

Bilquis’s PhD employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to understand how cultural products can be deployed to reconceptualise gender and identity in conflict zones, namely, Kabul, Afghanistan. Currently Bilquis is co-founder and lead for Hunar Symposia, a collective of academics and artists creating spaces of discourse and collaboration between practice and theory. She is also on the board of directors for HADIA foundation, an organisation that runs mobile libraries, multivitamin distribution and emergency support in Afghanistan.