2025 DDCA AWARDS WINNERS
WINNER: Professor Melitta Hogarth
Highly commended: NIDA’s First Nations Unit
WINNERS: Dr Shannon Owen & Assoc. Prof Donna Lyon
Highly commended: Dr Romy Ash, Dr Penni Russon, Dr Rose Michael and Dr Nicola Redhouse; and Dr Kim Munro
WINNERS: Associate Professor Bernadette (B) Hardy, Dr Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard, Eva Lloyd, Dr Sing D’Arcy, Dr Gillian Barlow, Annisa Jones and Dharug Dharawal Ngurra
WINNER: Professor Cat Hope
WINNER: Raphaela Rosella
1. Distinguished Australian First Nations Creative Leadership Award
WINNER: Professor Melitta Hogarth
Awarded Work
Prof Hogarth oversaw the Ngarrngga team’s creation of 391 education resources for this exhibition, and their adherence to principles of Relationality, Reciprocity, and Respect to support truth-telling through art, culture and education. Under her guidance, the education resources and professional learning initiatives developed for the exhibition support educators and students across grades 13-12 nation-wide as well as HE educators at the University of Melbourne to create spaces for honest dialogue with students about Australia’s past and present realities. This complex work demonstrates how art, culture, and education create rich contexts to enact curriculum and pedagogy in support of truth-telling. Prof Hogarth is also a founding co-lead of the Truth-telling and Reparative Pedagogies Lab, formed in recognition of the global work that educators and practitioners are doing to redress historical wrongs across diverse classroom settings. The Lab brings together teachers and researchers committed to truth-telling and reparation, and expands shared understandings on how to best approach this work in education.
Judges’ comments
Professor Hogarth’s submission demonstrates outstanding leadership in truth-telling and curriculum transformation, with a strong emphasis on embedding Indigenous perspectives across education sectors. Her work through Ngarrngga has created culturally safe and responsive learning environments, reaching diverse communities through extensive school and university resources, professional development programs, and national media engagement. The 65, 000 Years exhibition fosters multi-generational storytelling and celebrates First Nations knowledge systems. Her leadership builds bridges between students, educators, and institutions, while honouring Indigenous cultural protocols, strength, and voices throughout.
Highly commended
2. Distinguished Innovation in Creative Arts Award
WINNERS: Dr Shannon Owen & Assoc. Prof Donna Lyon
Shannon Owen, PhD is a documentary filmmaker and academic whose research investigates the transformative potential of documentary storytelling. Her practice-based research foregrounds collaborative methodologies and relational ethics, with a focus on how personal narratives intersect with broader socio-political contexts. Owen’s creative work has been exhibited through film festivals, broadcast, and gallery contexts. Works of note include Left Write Hook (2024), Guy Bourdin: Image Maker (2021), and Just Punishment (2006). Shannon is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at University of Melbourne where she coordinates the Victorian College of the Arts, Master of Film and Television program. Her research interests include co-creative methodologies, social impact filmmaking, and the intersection of documentary practice with futures discourse.
Donna Lyon, PhD is an Associate Professor in Film Producing at the University of Melbourne, a multi award-winning film producer, and Founder/CEO of Left Write Hook. She has produced over a dozen short films and the acclaimed feature Disclosure (Stan), alongside the Left Write Hook documentary (Melbourne International Film Festival 2024, Best Feature Film – Australian International Documentary Awards), now streaming on Netflix. Her research spans producing, trauma narratives, and social justice storytelling. Donna co-edited Left/Write/Hook (Loving Healing Press, 2024) and leads Left Write Hook, a national charity delivering creative trauma recovery and non-contact boxing programs for victim-survivors of childhood sexual abuse and gendered violence.
Awarded Work
The Left Write Hook documentary follows eight women and gender diverse survivors who come together in an experimental creative writing and boxing program as a way of working the through complex trauma of child sexual abuse. The project pioneered a trauma informed production methodology that centres socially responsible storytelling practices as a foundational filmmaking methodology. Developing the project within the academy enabled co-creative methods, embraced uncertainty and fostered creative experimentation that enriched the cinematic narrative. By integrating a trauma-informed framework from the onset, the researchers forged a path where relational ethics could flourish within a commercially funded film production model. This approach has been further developed as a theory of practice in Owen’s recently completed doctoral thesis.
Judges’ comments
We applaud Left Write Hook as innovative creative research that applies screen practice with applied medical research to deliver socially focussed public engagement and scholarly impact in generating national dialogue concerning gendered violence. With creative research underpinned by a social justice ethos, the power of Left Write Hook lies in the capturing of lived experiences of communities around domestic violence including re-narrativization of childhood sexual experiences. In foregrounding these difficult stories through screen practice these important stories take on an embodied resonance that is a pertinent facet within the creative arts.
We also recognise the exemplary power of this initiative based on its significant development of partnerships between academia, the screen industry, philanthropy and sector leaders working in Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA) and domestic violence. The initiative is most worthy of this innovation award, particularly in its very foregrounding of the lived experiences across communities as well as organisations that offer support services to the victim-survivors. It is great to see that Left Write Hook has received substantial research funding in support of the project’s arts, health and justice advocacy.
Highly commended
3. Distinguished Creative Teaching Award
WINNERS: Associate Professor Bernadette (B) Hardy, Dr Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard, Eva Lloyd, Dr Sing D’Arcy, Dr Gillian Barlow, Annisa Jones and Dharug Dharawal Ngurra
Dharug Dharawal Ngurra is the course convenor and Country that is part of the teaching and learning transformation underway in the School of Built Environment. It has been Dharug Dharawal since time immemorial, yet it’s geological history spans 294 million years. Its drowned river valley lands give way to the waterways rivers and seas across the urban metropolis of Sydney from the Blue Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, from the Hawkesbury River in the north the Georges River in the south.
Bernadette (B) Hardy is a Gamilaraay & Dharug woman with Irish and English heritage, B is an Associate Professor (Indigenous) in the UNSW School of Built Environment, working across Landscape Architecture and Interior Architecture Programs.
Dr Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard is a non-Indigenous woman with cultural ancestor ties to England and France, and Demark through marriage. Sara is a Senior Lecturer, Director of Landscape Architecture Program a Registered Landscape Architect and Fellow of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects AILA.
Eva Lloyd is a non-Indigenous woman with cultural ancestor ties to Hungary and Wales, and Italy through marriage. Eva is a Senior Lecturer (Interior Architecture Honours Program) and an interdisciplinary educator with an interest in justice-oriented and community-centered design pedagogies
Dr Sing Darcy is a non-Indigenous man with cultural ancestor ties to Europe and Asia. Sing is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Interior Architecture Program.
Dr Gillian Barlow is a Kaurna/Barkindji woman. Gillian is a Registered Architect, writer and Professor of Practice ( Indigenous) , in the UNSW School of Built Environment. Gillian contributed to the Bachelor of Interior Architecture graduation studio’s curriculum renewal in 2023, before moving to support the UNSW Master of Architecture Program in full.
Annisa Jones is a Burubirangal Dharug woman from Marrangurra (Richmond). Anissa is the Indigenous Academic Specialist for UNSW Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture where the School of Built Environment has its home. In 2023, Anissa worked with B Hardy and Gillian Barlow, alongside the Interior Architecture Program on the renewal of the Graduation Studio curriculum.
Awarded Work
Bernadette (B) Hardy returned to UNSW in 2023 as an Associate Professor (Indigenous) and as a Dharug and Gamilaraay Custodian of the land on which the university stands. Her presence on campus is guided by her Ancestors, whose strength and teachings she carries. B walks in right relation with all living beings, led by a two-way pedagogy that restores balance, belonging, and reciprocity through Art, Design, and Architecture.
Along this journey, B met team members—nominated here as a collective with Country—who hold space with integrity and unity. Together, we practice Remembering Country, a methodology grounded in cultural protocols requiring time, listening, patience, and grassroots dialogue. This process allows us to walk beside students, creating conditions for design that centre belonging and care for all life. In doing so, we honour our Ancestors by ensuring what we build, restore, and imagine is worthy of their love and strength.
As a cultural protocol of place, Remembering Country and Wellama, embed pedagogical practices that shift the act of design from an extractive process to one grounded in care, kinship, and responsibility.
Students and staff have cultivated kinship with Gari Gurad/Nura (Saltwater Country) and Nattai Gurad/Nura (Freshwater Country) Country. We remember critically endangered vegetation communities, such as the Cumberland Plain Woodland, Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest, and Grey Mangrove Forest. In LAND Graduation Studio, students actively map the relationships between keynote fauna and flora species, connecting soils, geology, water bodies, and microclimates to restore ecologies. In INTA Graduation Studio, explore interior’s agency in shaping relationships with Country through adaptive reuse of White Bay Power Station. Their work includes human, and more-than-human kin, bringing personal relationships with place into the design process.
Judges’ comments
Bernadette (B) Hardy and her team Dr Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard, Eva Lloyd, Dr Sing D’Arcy, Dr Gillian Barlow, Annisa Jones and Dharug Dharawal Ngurra showcase a highly transformative pedagogical approach grounded in First Nations knowledge at UNSW’s School of Built Environment. The teaching teams’ is distinctive in its specialised focus on cultural protocols, ecological care, and relational learning in Landscape Architecture and Interior Architecture. Through the methodology of Remembering Country, students and staff co-create spaces of belonging, reciprocity, and creative practice that honour Country as both teacher and collaborator.
We are particularly impressed by the teams’ demonstration of a deep commitment to experiential learning, with hands-on, site responsive design work as evidenced by students’ work samples. The student learning samples are outstanding – as they foreground students being guided and mentored in cultural protocols and storytelling to develop a deeper sense of human and non-human relationships. Student reflections clearly demonstrate how their understanding of design, professional identity and responsibility to Country has shifted in the course by this dedicated teaching collective. At the same time, students are co-creators in the learning process. The design studio environment becomes a living laboratory, where students and staff work together in dialogue with Country.
The submission is exemplary in comprehensively demonstrating the process of embedding First Nations knowledge and processes into courses in Landscape Architecture and Interior Architecture. Overall, this submission is most worthy of this teaching award as the team succeeded in creating a space for students where learning is deeply relational, supporting embodied understandings in a co-creative environment and grounding design thinking and practice in commitment to and care of Country. Such pedagogical work is transformational with cross generational impacts and ripple effects.
4. Distinguished Creative Researcher Award
WINNER: Professor Cat Hope
Cat Hope is an artistic researcher who engages with composition, flute and bass performance who creates music that is conceptually driven, in animated graphic scores formats for acoustic / electronic combinations as well as improvisations. Her music is characterised by engagement with political issues, aleatoric elements, drone, noise and glissandi as well as an ongoing fascination with low frequency sound that threads through all her creative work. She is the co-author of Digital Arts – An introduction to New Media (Bloomsbury) and Contemporary Musical Virtuosities (Routledge).
Awarded Work
Hope has demonstrated a major contribution to the field of music composition and performance research worldwide. She has transformed how we understand creative research through music by leading the development of new digital notation systems to make more inclusive music practices across different communities, music styles and purposes. This has involved practice led creative approaches resulting in new ways of composing, performing and making software to support music practice. She engages these collaborative music systems to create music compositions that highlight key humanitarian issues in Australia and overseas. Major works such as Speechless, an opera premiered in the Perth Festival (2019) and Ligeti Festival in Hamburg (2023) focus on the humanitarian plight of refugees, and involves them in lead roles as well as group participation (the Hamburg production featured recent arrived Ukrainian refugees). This is facilitated by digital notations developed to be read by anyone – irrespective of music background, experience or style. The performance will be released on Swiss label Hat Hut end 2025. She also does this in collaboration – in works such as Never At Sea (2023), an orchestral performance and installation with Kate McMillan at Kings College, London. This work examines the plight of refugees across seas, and included creative workshops for refugees which fed into the design of the work, premiered at St Mary on the Strand Church, London after an orchestral performance featuring Ruthless Jabiru Orchestra (2022). Here, music notation serves interdisciplinary collaboration across music, video, tapestry ad sculpture. Another example is ‘Landay Sequenza’, which engages the poetry of Afghan women in a song cycle designed to draw attention to thier struggle against the Taliban, using innovative scoring approaches based on Afghan women’s garments. This work was commissioned with funds from the Irish Arts Council, and premiered by Irish ensemble Stone Drawn Circles at the 2024 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the UKs leading annual new music event, where she was cited as ‘one of Australia’s leading creative voices’ (Graham McKenzie).
Evidence of outstanding achievement in research in the creative arts is demonstrated by extensive Creative Australia funding for projects ( 6 in the last 5 years), a European Research Grant ( ERC Horizon Generator, where Hope leads the Australasian contingent 2019 – 26), ARC SRI on Jazz and Gender (2021- 25), her appointment as to the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Studies (HIAS) (2202-23) and research fellow at the Orpheus Institute ( 2024–), Civitella and Churchill fellowships (2014) and a range of APRA AMC Art Music Awards (Best dramatic work for Speechless 2021, Best experimental 2014, 2017, and other nominations).
Judges’ comments
We congratulate Professor Cat Hope for her outstanding contribution to creative research. Her major research achievements form exemplary models of leadership and development in both understanding and undertaking of practice-led research across national and international contexts. We applaud the ways in which Professor Hope’s has transformed our understandings of creative research within the music field through her developing new digital notation systems for more inclusive, collaborative and humanitarian music practices across communities as demonstrated through her major creative works such as Speechless, an opera premiered in the Perth Festival (2019) and Ligeti Festival in Hamburg (2023) addressing the humanitarian plight of refugees. As these works include digital notations developed to be read by anyone, they demonstrate a genuine commitment of greater community accessibility regardless of music background and promote greater audience traction and reach. Her leadership and influence within and beyond creative arts sector extends to a high level of artistic collaboration, mentoring and HDR supervision, as well as being extensively supported by Creative Australia and ARC funding. Professor Hope’s research achievement demonstrated capacity building and key esteem factors take on an exemplary creative research leadership and a major contribution to the field and beyond.
5. Distinguished Creative Arts Doctoral Student Award
WINNER: Raphaela Rosella
Raphaela (Rosie) Rosella is an Italian Australian artist from Nimbin—an over-policed, low socio-economic community in New South Wales. For over fifteen years, she has worked at the intersection of socially engaged art and documentary practice, co-creating lens-based works alongside her sisters, friends, and family—women directly impacted by the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). Together, they have built a co-created archive spanning photography, moving image, audio, and the collection of ephemera and state-issued documents, to resist bureaucratic representations of their lived experiences. From an abolition feminist standpoint, her research challenges the foundations of archiving, the authorities that govern them, and reimagines how archives might function in non-carceral ways. In turn, her research offers a relational framework for decarcerating archives within long-form and collaborative documentary photography projects.
Awarded Work
You’ll Know It When You Feel It is a practice-led research project that examines how co-created archives can resist bureaucratic representations of women whose lives intersect with Australia’s Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). By examining the underlying mechanisms that maintain the PIC, this research explores how carceral conditions—surveillance, classification and control—are encoded within a wide range of institutions and practices, including photography, archival practices and arts institutions. The research has emerged from an abolition feminist standpoint to develop methods of self-representation that resist carceral conditions and offer liberatory alternatives beyond the rhetoric of collaborative frameworks often found in documentary photography and socially engaged art (SEA).
You’ll Know It When You Feel It builds on a co-created archive of imagery, recordings, state-issued documents, and ephemera produced and collected over a fifteen-year period alongside six long-term co-creators—my sisters and close friends. It comprises a written dissertation and a series of interconnected creative outcomes, including the co-creation of new artworks, a multi-authored art exhibition presented at the Institute of Modern Art, (2023) in Magan-djin/Meanjin (Brisbane), a public program co-produced by prison-advocacy organisation Sisters Inside, and a series of amended contracts designed to resist extractive institutional practices in the arts. Together, these elements examined the relational responsibilities involved in co-creating and presenting archives with friends, family, and kin navigating varying states of ‘un/freedom’.
Judges’ comments
Raphaela Rosella’s doctoral project You’ll Know It When You Feel It (2025) is an exemplary creative work, enabling strong community agency underpinned by a powerful commitment to personal truth-telling and a social justice ethos. The research project demonstrates an undeniable maturity that goes beyond academic structures and exceeds the expectations of a doctoral study. We are therefore pleased to agree with Raphaela’s doctoral examiner statements of this being an exceptional body of creative work.
The work is original and distinctive in providing a transformational practice-led research model for communities to hold a space in leading and addressing complex narratives. We applaud the co-creation of archives that resist bureaucratic representations of women whose lives intersect with Australia’s Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).
We would also like to acknowledge that the project takes leadership of a large program of activity in both scale and scope, while prioritising a nuanced focus that is further exemplified through the formation of an independent partnership with Sister’s Inside. The co-authored approach and comprehensive nature of the research, its current impact including multiple awards and funding, forecasts a sustained and ongoing community-centred contribution(s) through visual, oral and written forms of storytelling that urgently need to be told and shared.
The 2025 DDCA Awards were judged by Professor Jane Davidson (University of Melbourne), Professor Donna Hancox (QUT), Professor Meghan Kelly (Deakin), Professor Naomi Sunderland (Griffith), Professor Verena Thomas (ECU), with external moderator Professor Jen Webb (Uni of Canberra) and led by Associate Professor Beata Batorowicz (UniSQ)