Future Culture 2024-2025

Internships, artist residency

Please click here to learn more about Future Culture 2026-2027.

How do you build a more relevant, equitable, sustainable and future-focused arts culture?

You invest time and money in the people; and you create multi-directional opportunities for sharing, learning and growing relationships. Future Culture is a program from CuriousWorks that aims to do all of that.

It pairs an artist residency program (two early-career artists) with an arts worker development program (one arts worker graduate/trainee creative producer internship + one mid-career arts leader internship), embedding all 4 creatives in the company's operations to benefit the artists, arts workers, and the organisation symbiotically; and in turn to nurture sector development and foster sustainability for the community arts and cultural development sector.

2024 – 2025 cohort

Artists in Residence: Emma Pham, Cassandra Li

Arts worker interns: Kirsten Maglalang, Kobra Sayyadi

Read about the cohort's journey here.

Read Kirsten Maglalang and Kobra Sayyadi's reflections on the program here.

Read Emma Pham's reflections on the program here.

Read Cassandra Li's reflections on the program here.

Emma Pham – Future Culture 2024-25 CuriousWorks

Emma Pham
Future Culture Artist in Residence

Emma Pham is an emerging artist working with pixel art aesthetics to create game-like realms that offer a sense of openness, expansiveness and playfulness. In her practice, pixel art carries the memory of times spent in childhood indulging in the lost art of “girly” flash games and anime-style virtual worlds — whose servers have long since shut down. Playing into this digital nostalgia, her work is interested in the revitalisation of lost realms, both in the virtual and physical. In building them anew, she aims to re-animate our collective memory of what has passed or is currently being lost to capitalist and imperialist interests, which continue to erode our spirits and fracture our inner worlds. Ultimately, her work hopes to invite questions on how we can effectively mobilise nostalgia to stitch together the future worlds that lay existent within us.

Cassandra Li – Future Culture 2024-25 CuriousWorks

Cassandra Li
Future Culture Artist in Residence

Cass Li is an emerging artist and writer with a creative documentary practice from South West Sydney. Her essayistic work, often drawing on her Chinese Timorese-Indonesian heritage, seeks connection in present and ancestral realities. Through film and photography, she explores the moving boundaries of insider/outsider across time, place, and memory. Her graduate film, the sign of a frog (2022), was screened at Antenna Documentary Film Festival and she subsequently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference as a Leading Lights creative.
Passionate for making arts accessible and inclusive she undertook an internship with Accessible Arts and Art Gallery of NSW in 2023. In 2024 she worked as a mental health peer worker. She was supported by grants from Accessible Arts and CreateNSW which funded an artist residency in Portugal where she initiated research for a personal documentary project. She is continuing to develop this work in CuriousWorks’ Future Culture artist residency.

Kirsten Maglalang – Future Culture 2024-25 CuriousWorks

Kirsten Maglalang
Future Culture Arts Worker Intern

Kirsten Maglalang is an early-career artist based in Western Sydney. Her mixed-media practice reflects her desire to connect with her Filipino heritage with the creation of works that focus on language and cultural material. At the heart of her practice is her passion for exploring the many aspects of love and its transformative powers through collaborative art making.

During her time as a Future Culture Arts Worker Intern, she gained valuable experience in multiple areas of arts and cultural work. This great period of knowledge exchange helped her develop skills that align with her deep commitment to shaping a Future Culture that is both equitable and expansive.

She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UNSW Art & Design, where her practice in theory continues to motivate her to create art that amplifies human connection, honours memories and finds ways to keep them alive.

Kobra Sayyadi – Future Culture 2024-25 CuriousWorks

Kobra Sayyadi
Future Culture Arts Worker Intern

Kobra Sayyadi is an arts worker, theatremaker and interdisciplinary artist who lives on Dharawal country in South West Sydney. She is interested in working across different mediums including poetry, theatre, film and audio to tell stories that probe, excite and elevate. She has a Bachelor of Arts, with a major in English literature and minor in anthropology and has recently commenced work at Bell Shakespeare as their Education Sales Assistant. In 2024 she was selected for ATYP’s Emerging Dramaturgs program.

She is also one of eight artists selected to form PYT's 2024 Company and a co-writer and co-producer of their upcoming children's theatre show. Previously, Kobra was the co-writer and assistant director of ‘Tuân’s Party‘ (dir Neda Taha), a nominal Australian play devised by young Western Sydney artists as part of the 2023 PYT Company program.

Kobra is also co-writer and assistant director of the play adaptation of novel ‘Detention‘ with celebrated Dramaturg and Actor Callan Purcell, for Monkey Baa Theatre. Kobra’s latest project is Page to Stage playwriting program facilitated by Donna Abela with NToP and NIDA.

In 2022 Kobra completed a residency at the Bankstown Arts Centre and published her first feature essay ‘Unveiling through Art‘ on Turkish-Australian contemporary artist Cigdem Aydemir for the Sydney Review of Books literary magazine. She is also co-producer of a short film written by Western Sydney filmmaker Faraaz Rahman. Kobra is also a blog producer and executive member of the Community Environmental Monitoring (CEM) blog, a group dedicated to grassroots community activism concerning air pollution in Australia.

CREDITS

Creative Producer: Miranda Aguilar

Headshots: Dylan Mangunay

Future Culture 2024-2025 was supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

Contact

Contact us here

Find us at:
Fairfield City HQ
17 Kenyon St,
Fairfield, NSW, 2165,
Australia

Mail us at:
PO Box 112,
Liverpool, NSW, 1871,
Australia

View our visual story to know exactly how to find us

02 9602 9568

ABN 49 717 992 269

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Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.

Our office is located on Darug land at Fairfield City HQ. We would like to acknowledge the Cabrogal Clan of the Darug Nation, the traditional custodians of the land. Our work takes us across Darug, Dharawal and Eora lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.