Applications are now open for the 2019 Witness First Nations Emerging Critic
Witness, founded earlier this year by Alison Croggon and Robert Reid, is a curated website that fosters critical discussion of the Australian performing arts. The First Nations Emerging Critic will be Melbourne-based and will work as part of the core Witness team throughout 2019, writing reviews of contemporary work and longer critical essays. Alison Croggon and Robert Reid provide mentoring to develop and focus critical skills.
The inaugural FNEC, Carissa Lee, will continue with Witness as an assistant editor and critic in 2019.
The FNEC is a core part of the Witness mission to expand and diversify critical voices in the Australian arts.
Throughout our first year, Witness published reviews and essays by Indigenous critics, writers of colour and writers with disabilities, foregrounding important arguments about representation, inclusion and aesthetic practice. We published the first theatre review by a Blind critic, Olivia Muscat, the beginning of what will be a growing part of our critical coverage in 2019. Towards the end of the year we collaborated with West Writers and Footscray Community Arts Centre on the New Review program to mentor and publish four new critics from marginalised backgrounds.
We believe these voices are crucial to the ongoing health of the performing arts in Australia, opening important perspectives that have been sidelined for too long in Australian critical discourse.
The FNEC includes a stipend of $5000 plus commission fees for extra work. Witness aims to be a place of cultural safety.
Applicants are asked to email us at info@witnessperformance.com attaching a one page (A4) letter in which they outline why they would like this position and including full contact details. Please attach up to 10 pages of your writing. Note that the work sample doesn’t have to be about performing arts, and it doesn’t matter whether it has been published.
The applications will be judged by Alison Croggon, Carissa Lee and Robert Reid.
Applications close at 5pm on January 18, 2018. The 2019 First Nations Emerging Critic will be announced in February and will begin working with us in March 2019.
