Daniel Mudie Cunningham is the director of programs at Carriageworks. Previously, Daniel has held curatorial roles at Artbank and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery; and teaching and research positions at Western Sydney University, where he completed his PhD in cultural studies in 2004. Most recently, he curated The National 2019: New Australian Art; initiated The Kathy Cavaliere Fellowship; and led the curatorial delivery of a major public art strategy tied to the redevelopment of South Eveleigh in inner Sydney.
Michelle Cawthorn is a multidisciplinary artist who invokes memory and personal experience through her unique visual language of repetitive mark-making. Exploring themes related to childhood, identity and place, she creates intricate and enigmatic works that hover between abstraction and figuration. Though grounded in drawing, her practice intersects with painting, sculpture, and installation.
Over the past two decades, her work has been exhibited in many public galleries and museums, including her 2015 solo exhibition Bittersweet at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and recently Songbird at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery in 2021. Cawthorn has twice won the Hazelhurst Art on Paper, Friends of Hazelhurst Local Artist Award (2017, 2013) and in 2017 was a finalist in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW. She has been the recipient of grants from NAVA and Create NSW and postgraduate research scholarships including an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and an Australian Postgraduate Award. She holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of NSW where she also teaches, and her ongoing research is concerned with contemporary art practice and its intersection with memory studies and neuroscience. Her artwork is held in several Australian public collections, including ARTBANK, and she is represented by OLSEN Gallery, Sydney.
