Reworlders
The Reworlders are a collective of Indigenous, people of colour, settler and LGBTIQA2S+ artists, scientists, thinkers and change-makers with a track record of collaboratively working at the intersections of art, the climate emergency leadership, speculative futures and disaster resilience. We are a group of bridge-builders and connectors with diverse and intersecting practices. Our growing body of critical work subverts conventional platforms for engagement in the climate emergency through a methodology of ‘deliberate structured improvisation’ and Joy Work.
Dr Jen Rae (she/her, they/them)
Co-founder and Creative Research Lead
Co-Lead, Creative Resilience Lab
Jen is an award-winning artist-researcher of Canadian Métis*-Scottish descent, living and creating on Wurrundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Jen’s practice-led research expertise is in the discursive field of contemporary environmental art and arts-based environmental communication. It is centered around cultural responses to climate change/emergency (a.k.a. ‘everything change’ as coined by Margaret Atwood), specifically the role of artists. Their work is engaged in discourses around climate-related disaster risk reduction + resilience, speculative futures and intergenerational justice predominantly articulated through transdisciplinary collaborative methodologies, Indigenous pedagogies and community alliances.
Jen creates and contributes to experimental multi-platform collaborative projects, including being a core artist of Arts House’s prescient multi-year REFUGE project (2016-2022) - where artists, emergency service providers and communities
work together to rehearse climate-related emergencies and explore the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness.
Jen is a Creative Australia Fellow for Emerging and Experimental Art (2023/24), the Australian National University’s H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow (2024) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence (2024/25). They recently delivered a keynote and workshop for the United Nation’s Global Platform for Disasters & Displacement in Geneva (June 2025).
Jen is a member of Global Artivism’s Catalysing Committee and previously a board member of the Creative Recovery Network (2017-2023), the International Environmental Communication Association (2019-2023), and currently is a member of the National Taskforce for Creative Recovery.
Claire G. Coleman (she/her)
Co-founder and Lead Writer
Claire is a Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia, she was born in Boorloo (Perth) and is currently based in Naarm. Her debut novel Terra Nullius [2017], published in Australia and in the US, won a Norma K. Hemming Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and an Aurealis Award. Her second novel is The Old Lie [2019], followed by Lies, Damn Lies [2021] unpacks the damages of colonisation, and her new book Enclave was released in July 2022.
Her essays, poetry, short fiction and art criticism has been published in the Saturday Paper, Guardian, Spectrum, Meanjin, Griffith Review and many others. Claire is currently working on a commissioned play for the Malthouse Theatre, and is the lead writer on Child of Now, an experimental site-specific extensible reality theatre project. Claire is currently leading the Knowledge Keepers, part of Creative Climate consulting with First Nations mob around Australia.
Maree Grenfell (she/her)
Community and Resilience Strategist
Co-Lead, Creative Resilience Lab
Maree is an accomplished change strategist and thought leader with a track record of achievement across the community, private and government sectors. She has 20+ years’ experience in developing creative strategies and programs to help organisations improve their sustainability, reduce impact on climate change and build resilience to future challenges. Maree worked as Melbourne’s Deputy Chief Resilience Officer for six years (as part of the 100 Resilient Cities global program), creating and implementing Australia’s first urban resilience strategy (Resilient Melbourne) led by local government.
She works in various roles including Co-Manager City Resilience and Sustainable Futures for the City of Melbourne as well as her own consultancy, Once Upon Tomorrow. Her expertise is in designing, delivering, facilitating and successfully implementing innovative solutions with and for broad audiences. She is passionate about creating change and upholds strong personal integrity to do so; her goal is a community-centred future in which cities and human wellbeing are interdependent. In her spare time she “reworlds” in the garden and loves to weave plant fibres.
Teneille Clerke aka Tenfingerz (she/they)
Creative Producer
Teneille (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and creative producer. Her practice focuses on social change and community engagement through art-making and events. She works across the mediums of performance, writing, visual art, installation, and broadcasting.
Teneille’s work has been programmed at Sydney Festival, Art Gallery of NSW, Re//Perth Festival, Midsumma Festival, Science Gallery, The National Wool Museum, Melbourne Fashion Festival, Melbourne Fashion Week, Shepparton Festival, Melbourne Art Book Fair, South Side Festival, National Sustainable Living Festival, and Gertrude Street Projection Festival. Teneille’s art practice centres around collaboration. She is in two collectives — Fast Fashun and The Midnight Horrors. And, has worked with
the MKA Theatre of New Writing, Doppelgangster (UK & Aus), Enormous Face (USA), Teatro de los Sentidos (Spain), and Take 3 Presents (USA).
In 2021, Teneille was the City of Yarra’s artist-in-residence for community art and climate action. She devised, curated and produced The Big Local Arts and Climate Expo as part of the residency and received a Green Room Award nomination for artistic direction and curation for the project.
She is currently studying creative non-fiction writing in the Professional Writing and Editing course at RMIT. Teneille writes confessional autofiction under a moniker. Her work on men’s violence was shortlisted for the Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Award 2025. She is a current Hot Desk Fellow at The Wheeler Centre.
The practice of Reworlding is to deepen collaborative relationships and support the work of our network of relations.
Some of those REWORLDING with us on past projects + programs, cultural protocols, advisory, knowledge sharing, strategy and dramaturgy include:
Naomi Velaphi (she/her)
Program Design - Strategic
Naomi Naomi is the Head of Programming at Arts House with a background working as an independent producer. Born on Whadjuk Noongar country and residing in Naarm (Melbourne)., she strives to nurture artists' work and practices exploring alternative narratives, radical thought and deep connection. Centered on producing the work of contemporary, diverse and interdisciplinary artists her experience spans working for and amongst galleries, festivals and performance spaces.
In Melbourne, Naomi has held producing roles for a number of arts institutions including Australian Performing Arts Market, Arts House, Arts Centre Melbourne, Abbotsford Convent and Koorie Heritage Trust. Her curatorial interests are derived through her experiences as a woman of African and Asian identities and the communities she represents. She holds a Masters of Arts and Cultural Management from the University of Melbourne, is a part of the Australia Council Arts Leadership Program and sits on the board of leading sound organisation Liquid Architecture.
Dr Vicki Couzens (she/her)
Cultural Lead
Vicki is Gunditjmara from the Western Districts of Victoria. She acknowledges her ancestors and elders who guide her work. Dr Couzens has worked in Aboriginal community affairs for almost 40 years. Her contributions in the reclamation, regeneration and revitalisation of cultural knowledge and practice extend across the ‘arts and creative cultural expression’ spectrum including language revitalisation, ceremony, community arts, public art, visual and performing arts, and writing.
She is a Senior Knowledge Custodian for Possum Skin Cloak Story and Language Reclamation and Revival in her Keerray Woorroong Mother Tongue. Vicki is employed at RMIT as a Vice Chancellors Indigenous Research Fellow developing her Project ‘watnanda koong meerreeng , tyama-ngan malayeetoo (together body and country, we know long time)’ The key objective of this Project is to produce model/s, pathways and resources for continuing the reinvigoration of Aboriginal Ways of Knowing Being and Doing with a special focus on language revitalisation.
Angharad Wynne-Jones (she/her)
Creative Strategist
Angharad Wynne-Jones (she/her) is Cymry (Welsh) Australian and lives on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation in Narrm (Melbourne). She is currently leading Creative Climate - funded by Creative Australia, is the new national peak body for arts and climate providing leadership, connections, advocacy and access to high-quality resources that support artists, arts workers and arts and cultural organisations and their funders to transition from a carbon economy and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Previously roles include: Head of Audience Engagement at the State Library Victoria, leading a team to create large scale exhibitions, public programs and events that support community knowledge building; Head of Creative Engagement at Arts Centre Melbourne (2017-2021),
facilitating Alter State – a disability led performing arts festival alongside a host of large scale public and participative performance programs. From 2011-2017 she was Artistic Director at Arts House, City of Melbourne, a contemporary arts production house where she initiated Refuge- a five year action research into the role of cultural institutions and communities in responding to the impacts of climate disasters. She was Founder Director of TippingPoint Australia (2010-2019) co-designed and delivered NIDA’s MFA Cultural Leadership course 2015-2018
Lauren Rickards (she/her)
Researcher
Professor Lauren Rickards is a human geographer and ecologist by training now working primarily on climate change futures and related questions about the urban-rural and human-nature relationship. With degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Melbourne, and experience in the private sector, Lauren conducts research on many of the social dimensions of climate change, particularly in the water and agri-food sectors and with collaborators in other disciplines and organisations.
Lauren advises a wide range of groups in government, business and the NGO sector on climate change issues and is a Lead Author with the Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change. At RMIT University, Lauren has been working with others to support critical and purposeful engagement with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and questions of research impact.
Kamarra Bell-Wykes (she/her)
Dramaturg
Kamarra is a descendent of the Yagera and Butchulla people of South-East Queensland. Recently appointed to the role of Creative Director at ILBIJERRI Theater Company, Kamarra has twenty years’ experience as a playwright as well as a Bachelor of Teaching and Learning. Her works include award winning health-education shows Chopped Liver, Body Armor and North West of Nowhere.
These plays were written specifically for prison, school and Aboriginal community audiences and combined have toured over eleven years and have been seen by more than 50,000 people across Australia. Over the last three years Kamarra has begun developing a First Nations approach to directing, devising and dramaturgy.
Kamarra has worked with us on REFUGIUM, The First Assembly of the Centre for Reworlding and the Creative Resilience Lab (Mount Alexander).
dawn weleski (she/her, they/them)
Collaborator
dawn weleski is an interdisciplinary artist whose work transforms political and social conflict into participatory performance. They co-founded Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant serving cuisine from countries in conflict with the U.S., using food as a medium for dialogue and cultural connection. Their practice disrupts everyday norms through projects like City Council Wrestling, where citizens and politicians perform their political beliefs as wrestling characters, and Refuse Refuse: Radio, a speculative climate fiction broadcast from a mutual aid ambulance in rural New York. The project combines survival skill-sharing with dramatized climate collapse scenarios and is supported by grants from Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art, NYSCA, and the Harpo Foundation.
dawn weleski has exhibited at major institutions including the Hammer Museum, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and The Mercosul Biennial. They have held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, SOMA (Mexico City), and The Atlantic Center for the Arts, and received fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation and Colgate University. They hold a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Stanford. Currently, they are the Student Life Sustainability Artist in Residence at the University of Michigan, where they co-initiated Noon at Night, a global solidarity network of transgressive learners.
Kate Sulan (she/her)
Dramaturg
Kate Sulan is a performance maker, dramaturge and facilitator, specialising in collaboratively devised performance. Kate was the founding Artistic Director of Rawcus, an award-winning ensemble of performers with diverse minds, bodies and imaginations and led the company for 22 years (2000-2022). Kate is also a long-term collaborator with Back to Back. She has worked with the company as a co-devisor, dramaturge and director. Kate was one of the team of artists working on the multiyear Refuge project at Arts House. Refuge explored the role of artists and cultural institutions in times of climate catastrophe.
Kate has an Advanced Diploma in Group Facilitation ( Groupwork Centre) and is a trained mediator ( Resolution Institute). She has been helping to hold space and facilitate complex and challenging conversations with care and creativity.
Kate’s practice is relational and collaborative. Her work embraces complexity and diversity and is underpinned by the desire to amplify connection, fuel dreams, accumulate questions, slow down time, invite reflection, challenge what is possible and celebrate humanity.
Kate worked with us on the Creative Resilience Lab (Mount Alexander).
Alex Kelly (she/her)
Evaluation & Impact Producer
Alex Kelly is an artist, filmmaker, producer and activist based on Dja Dja Wurrung land, ‘Australia’. Working across film, theatre, communications strategy and troublemaking, Alex purposefully connects the disciplines of art and social change. Producer of award-winning documentaries Island of the Hungry Ghosts and In My Blood it Runs, creative producer on Ngapartji Ngapartji, and Global Impact & Distribution Producer on Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.
Alex has been supported by a Churchill Fellowship, a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and a Bertha Challenge Fellowship. Alex’s current focus is the futuring practice The Things We Did Next, a hybrid of theatre, imagination and democracy [co-created with David Pledger from not yet it’s difficult].…
Alex has worked with us on The First Assembly of the Centre for Reworlding.
Devon Taylor (she/her, they/them)
Producer - special projects
Devon is an independent producer born on unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory on Turtle Island and now living on Dja Dja Wurrung land in ‘Australia’. Her work is driven by a passion for creating social and political change through making art together. She has extensive experience working across all facets of live and interdisciplinary performance, including circus, physical theatre, theatre, live art and participatory practise.
From 2014-2022, Devon was Executive Director and then Co-CEO/ Creative Producer at feminist community arts organistion, Women’s Circus.
Devon has sat on the National Circus and Physical Advisory Committee for Theatre Network Australia, the Arts West Alliance and the One Night in Footscray Committee. More recently, she has worked with Arts Centre Melbourne and was the Lead Producer for the Centre for Reworlding in 2022- supporting the collective to build their partnerships and organisational and brand strategies. Devon applies principles of intersectional feminism to her collaborative approach to realising new artworks and sees her role as a conduit for community creativity and storytelling.
Devon has worked with us on producing the Centre for Reworlding and special projects such as the Creative Resilience Labs at the Museum of Discovery and Clarendon Creative.
Syrus Marcus Ware (he/him)
Collaborator
Dr Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, and Assistant Professor at McMaster University’s School of the Arts. His multidisciplinary practice—spanning drawing, installation, and performance—explores social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. His work has been widely exhibited, including solo shows at Tangled Art + Disability, Grunt Gallery, and Wil Aballe Art Projects, and featured in the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019, 2022) and The Bentway’s Safety in Public Spaces initiative.
As a curator, Syrus has led projects like That’s So Gay (Gladstone Hotel), Re:Purpose (Robert McLaughlin Gallery), and The Church Street Mural Project. He is co-curator of The Cycle, a disability arts performance initiative with the National Arts
Centre. A member of the PDA Collective, he also co-programmed Crip Your World, a queer/POC disability arts event for Mayworks 2014.
Syrus is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter- Canada and the Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism. Syrus is a past co-curator of Blackness Yes!/Blockorama and the Wildseed Black Arts Fellowship. Syrus has won several awards, including the TD Diversity Award in 2017. Syrus was voted “Best Queer Activist” by NOW Magazine (2005) and was awarded the Steinert and Ferreiro Award (2012). Syrus holds a doctorate from York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. He is the co-editor of the best-selling Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada (URP, 2020), and Marvellous Grounds: Queen of Colour Formations (BTL, 2018) and Queering Urban Justice (UTP, 2018).
Syrus has worked with the Centre for Reworlding on the Creative Resilience Lab: Madison | Dane (2025) , The Future of Canada 2050 (2023) and Protest Methods & Banner Making (2022).
Katia Tynan (she/her)
Collaborator
Katia Tynan is a leader and relationship-builder who currently leads the Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction team at the City of Vancouver. Katia oversees the implementation of the City of Vancouver's Resilient Vancouver Strategy (2019) and the more recently led the development of Vancouver’s Hazard, Risk, and Vulnerability Analysis (2024), both of which advance the city's understanding of risk and resilience in municipal planning. Her work has advanced disaster risk and climate change adaptation governance and collaboration across departments and intergovernmental working groups. Katia works tirelessly to amplify the voices and needs of communities
disproportionately impacted by disasters and emergencies. Through the Resilient Neighbourhoods Program she has established partnerships with over 25 community-based organizations to deliver essential services to their communities for extreme heat and wildfire smoke events.
Katia holds a BA in Geography and Political Science, an MA in Disaster & Emergency Management, a certificate in strategic foresight, and is currently working towards her MSc in Health Equity and Sustainability. She has extensive experience in research, planning, program management, and hands-on response efforts. Her person-centred, community-building approach is reflected in her work at the local and the global level as a member of the Resilient Cities Network. You can find Katia’s thoughts on the importance of integrating artists in emergency management and disaster risk reduction here.
Katia worked with us (pre-Centre for Reworlding) on the first Creative Resilience Lab (Vancouver, 2019) and recently on the Creative Resilience Lab: Madison | Dane.
Partners
The Centre for Reworlding recognises our partnerships:
