Judging Panel

The 2010 selection committee comprises Tony Ellwood, Director, Queensland Art Gallery; Bec Dean, Associate Director, Performance Space, Sydney; and Larissa Hjorth, artist and Senior Lecturer in Digital Art and Games Programs at the School of Creative Media and Computer Science at RMIT, Melbourne. The Premier of Queensland, Anna Bligh, MP, is scheduled to announce both the award winner and the scholarship recipient on Friday 27 August 2010.

Bec Dean is Associate Director of Performance Space, Sydney. She is a curator and writer who trained as a visual artist. Prior to her role at Performance Space, Bec was curator at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (2005–07), exhibition manager at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2002–05) and held various positions at Perth’s John Curtin Gallery (1997–2001). She was Chair of both the Artrage Festival in Perth (2003–05) and the Young People and the Arts Panel of ArtsWA (2001–02), and was on the selection panel for the Bundanon Trust Residency Program (2007–09). Bec's curatorial interests revolve around photomedia, new media technologies, art–science partnerships, interdisciplinary practice, performance and site-specificity. She has written catalogue essays for galleries and museums, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), Artspace (Sydney) and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. She has also published in numerous Australian art journals, including Art & Australia, Artlink, RealTime, Column (Artspace), Photofile, Flash (Centre for Contemporary Photography), Runway and Broadsheet.

Tony Ellwood is the Director of the Queensland Art Gallery. This two-campus facility includes the Gallery of Modern Art, which opened in December 2006. Prior to taking up this position in June 2007, Tony was Deputy Director, International Art, at the National Gallery of Victoria for seven years. He was Director, Bendigo Art Gallery (1996–99) and worked as a curator at the National Gallery of Victoria (1993–96), where he specialised in major international curatorial projects. He was also an Aboriginal Art Coordinator, working at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, Kununurra (1991–92). Tony has been on numerous state and Commonwealth boards, including the Visions of Australia Committee, Museums Australia National Board and Victorian College of the Arts (Board and Academic committee). He was also on the selection committee for the 2005 and 2009 Venice Biennales, and has written and edited numerous publications and articles. Currently on the Japan–Australia Foundation Board, Tony will undertake the role of nominator for the next Hiroshima Art Prize, organised by Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Foundation.

Dr Larissa Hjorth is a researcher, artist and lecturer in the Games and Digital Art Programs at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Larissa’s research interests are in the areas of mobile communication, gaming and virtual communities in the Asia Pacific region. She has published widely in national and international journals, including Convergence, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Continuum, ACCESS, Fibreculture and Southern Review, and has edited the anthologies Games of Locality: Gaming Cultures in the Asia-Pacific (with Dean Chan) and Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunication to Media (with Gerard Goggin). The author of Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific: Gender and the Art of Being Mobile (Routledge, 2009) and the forthcoming Gaming and Gaming Culture (Berg, 2010), Larissa is also a regular speaker at international conferences on mobile media, Asian and Pacific popular culture, new media, as well as information and communication technologies.