Paris Art Fellowships

Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra Peoples, Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and has Anglo-Australian/Chinese/German/Irish/Scottish heritage. For four decades Brenda has undertaken a leading role in national and international First Nations and broader contemporary arts/cultural sectors as a multi-disciplinary creative practitioner (academic, administrator, artist, curator, educator, researcher, scholar). Brenda’s creative work is represented in major national and international public and private collections, and she has being the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, commissions and grants for academic and creative-led research. Since 2021 she has been Professor of Indigenous Art History & Curatorship at the Australian National University, and states she is privileged to live and work on unceded sovereign Kamberri/Ngambri/Ngunawal homelands. Brenda’s creative-led academic research encompasses Critical Indigenous Performative Collaborative Autoethnography and Storywork methodologies and theoretical frameworks. In her ANU role Brenda co-leads an ANU Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Grand Challenge, 'Murrudha; Sovereign Walks - tracking cultural actions through art, Country, language and music', with colleagues from SOAD and Fenner School of Environment and Society, working closely with and guided by First Nations communities, including Dhurga-Yuin/Ngambri/Ngunawal/Monaro- Ngarigo/Walgalu-Wiradyuri Peoples. In 2024 Brenda was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University.

Born in Tehran, Farnaz Dadfar is an interdisciplinary Iranian-Australian artist based in Sydney. Her practice spans sculpture, painting, installation, video, and text, exploring the notion of diaspora through the lens of migration and storytelling. Motivated by exilic sensations and hybrid positions, her experimental and polyphonic expressions reinterpret the ambivalent legacies of Eastern–Western juxtapositions through fragmented themes of displacement, cultural identity, and nomadism, tracing visceral connections between lived experience, research, and artistic practice. Farnaz has exhibited in galleries and museums across Australia, Germany, Indonesia, and Iran, including Annandale Galleries (Sydney), QUT Art Museum (Brisbane), Linden New Art (Melbourne), Spinnerei (Leipzig), Sarang Building (Yogyakarta), and Saba Cultural Artistic Institute (Tehran). She has received numerous grants and awards, including the Paulette Isabel Jones Career Development Award, the Arthur Macquarie Travelling Scholarship, the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship – SCA Travel, the Anne Runhardt Art Award (Notfair), the David Richards Drawing Award, and the VCA Galloway Lawson Prize. Farnaz holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney and is a sessional academic at Sydney College of the Arts.

Rosie Isaac (b. Naarm/Melbourne, 1990) is an artist with a research-based sculpture, writing, video and performance practice. Rosie is interested in artmaking as a form of attention to material, social and linguistic systems. Her recent projects have looked at waste, soil chemistry, the law, libraries and reading. Rosie has shown work across the National Gallery of Victoria, West Space, Conduction, Liquid Architecture, Next Wave and Gertrude Contemporary among others. She is a sessional academic at MADA, Monash University.

Kate Just is an artist of Polish, Irish, German and Scottish descent (born USA, migrated to Australia 1996). Her visual art practice and research is focussed on the use of knitting, sewing, textiles and photo-media to explore feminist, queer and political histories through the lens of her own personal experiences. In addition to her solo practice, Just also works in community contexts to create large scale public art projects that tackle significant social issues including gender-based violence, reproductive freedom and LGBTQIA rights. Kate Just holds a PhD in Sculpture (Monash University), an MA (RMIT), and a BFA (VCA), where she is a Senior Lecturer in Art. Just has exhibited extensively across Australia; her work is held in numerous collections including NGA, NGV, and AGSA. She has won many awards and grants for her work including the Australia Council Visual Art Fellowship, The Wangaratta Textile Prize, The British Council Realise Your Dream Award and the Rupert Bunny Fellowship.  Internationally she has exhibited at AIR Gallery (USA), the Rijswijk Museum (Netherlands), Kunsthalle Krems (Austria), Youkobo Artspace (Japan), Contextile Biennale (Portugal) and Suwon Museum of Art (South Korea). Kate Just is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery in Adelaide.