Arts & Culture list: our panel
We put together an expert panel of journalists to compile the inaugural list of 100 game changers in the arts. Learn more about the panel.
Tim Douglas
Editor, The List: Arts & Culture
Rarely has there been such an urgent need for a strong, healthy and vibrant arts and cultural scene than in Australia right now.
As we emerge from the global pandemic and a slew of devastating natural disasters, Australians look to our cultural leaders for solace, enlightenment and respite.
Who are those people challenging and altering the landscape in Australia in 2022?
We put together an expert panel of journalists to compile the inaugural list of 100 game changers in the arts. Learn more about the panel below.
See The List: 100 Arts & Culture game changers
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Caroline Overington
Literary Editor, The Australian
Caroline Overington has twice won Australia’s most prestigious award for journalism, the Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism. She has also won the Sir Keith Murdoch award for Journalistic Excellence and the richest prize for business writing, the Blake Dawson Prize. Before being appointed literary editor she spent five years investigating the disappearance of three-year-old foster child William Tyrrell, and she is host of the Seven Network’s four-part documentary about the case.
Overington is a judge of both the Vogel Literary Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. She writes thrillers for HarperCollins and is the author of Last Woman Hanged, which won the Davitt Award for True Crime Writing.
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Matthew Westwood
Arts Correspondent, The Australian
Matthew Westwood started writing about the arts as a cadet with The Australian in 1990. Since then he has covered the performing arts – opera, classical music, theatre and dance – as well as exhibitions, cultural tourism and philanthropy. Top arts adventures? Swimming with the Australian Chamber Orchestra at Ningaloo Reef, and talking Wagner with Stephen Fry at Bayreuth in Germany. Westwood says the texture of Australia’s cultural life is always evolving but some things are constant.
“There are so many amazing artists in this country, and there’s an audience for them,” he says.
“The fun part of being a journalist is helping to connect the two.”
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Bridget Cormack
Deputy Editor, The Weekend Australian Review
Bridget Cormack worked on The Australian’s arts desk from 2010 to 2013, based in Brisbane. She was head of communications at Sydney Symphony Orchestra and editor of the company’s news site Backstage News+. As a freelance journalist her work was published in The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Collective Hub magazine and The Southern Courier. Cormack returned to The Australian as deputy editor of Review in 2019.
She loves writing experiential stories, has made dumplings with Mao’s Last Dancer and Queensland Ballet artistic director Li Cunxin, acted as a zombie extra in an Australian horror film, and surfed with ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti.
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Andrew McMillen
National Music Writer, The Australian
Andrew McMillen is an award-winning journalist and author based in Brisbane. Since January 2018, he has worked as national music writer at The Australian. Previously, his feature writing has been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone and GQ.
He won the feature writing category at the Queensland Clarion Awards in 2017 for a story published in The Weekend Australian Magazine, and won the freelance journalism category at the Queensland Clarion Awards from 2015–2017.
In 2014, UQP published his book Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs, a collection of stories that featured 14 prominent Australian musicians.
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Jane Albert
Deputy Editor/Senior Contributor, The List: Arts & Culture
Jane Albert is a journalist and author with 20 years experience writing about arts and culture. She worked for eight years on the arts desk of The Australian as a news and feature writer and deputy arts editor. Today she is a regular contributor to The Australian, Vogue Australia, The Australian Financial Review, Broadsheet (Sydney), The Good Weekend and Dance Gazette (UK). She was a consultant and interviewer on the TV documentary Blood and Thunder: the Sound of Alberts and a script consultant on the TV series Friday on my Mind.
Her book House of Hits was published by Hardie Grant in 2010. Jane has written a number of features for The List and says visiting the studio of Sri Lankan- Australian artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, “a considered, smart and super-funny man”, was a highlight.
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Hannah-Rose Yee
Features Editor, Vogue Australia
Hannah-Rose Yee is features editor at Vogue Australia and a contributor to The Australian, where she writes on film, television, culture and the zeitgeist. She has written for publications around the world, including marie claire Australia, Stylist and Gourmet Traveller, and been an accredited film critic at the Toronto International Film Festival, London Film Festival and New York Comic Con.
For The List, she profiled homegrown rising stars and dug into the success of our film and television industry and the unique factors that have set us up for continued prominence on a global stage.
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Ashleigh Wilson
Author and journalist
Ashleigh Wilson is a writer, consultant, journalist and author. He once intended to be a professional pianist too, the jazz world beckoning with varying levels of enthusiasm, but he fell into journalism and never looked back.
He began his career at The Australian in Sydney before spending several years in Brisbane, later becoming the paper’s Darwin correspondent and winning a Walkley Award in 2006 for reports on unethical behaviour in the Aboriginal art industry. He then spent almost a decade as The Australian’s arts editor before leaving the paper in 2020.
He is the author of Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing (2016), On Artists (2019) and A Year With Wendy Whiteley, to be published in late 2022.
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Rosemary Neill
Senior Writer, The Weekend Australian Review
Rosemary Neill is a senior writer with The Weekend Australian’s Review. She has won a Walkley Award for feature writing, and been shortlisted for a further four Walkleys for feature writing, arts writing and criticism. She has also been an op-ed columnist and Inquirer editor for The Australian. Her book, White Out: How Politics is Killing Black Australia, was shortlisted in the NSW and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.
One of her proudest moments as a journalist was her successful news campaign that helped the descendants of Albert Namatjira win back the legendary Aboriginal artist’s copyright, and thus control of his legacy.
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