Team

Joanna Kitto, Director

Joanna Kitto has been Director of West Space since late 2022. She has spent her career refining her inclusive, personable and receptive approach to contemporary art presentation, generating meaningful connections between artists and audiences. Joanna has held curatorial and leadership positions across university art museums, festivals, council and contemporary art organisations, and is a co-founder of independent platform fine print.

Sebastian Henry-Jones, Curator

Sebastian Henry-Jones has been Curator at West Space since 2021. With an interest in DIY thinking, he looks to embody these ideals in a practice that centres the needs, ideas and requirements of those that he works with. Seb's practice is informed by striving for a personal ethics with sincerity, generosity, honest communication and learning at its core.

Ronen Jafari, Administrator

Ronen Jafari is an artist with a focus on sustainability through culinary practices. Ronen started in his role at West Space in 2023, and with training in business and finance, also works at Liquid Architecture and TBC Gallery. Ronen recently self-published a cookbook integrating plant-based cooking into a busy, low-budget share house kitchen.

Benjamin Baker, Gallery Assistant

Benjamin Baker is an artist working in painting and performance. Benjamin began volunteering at West Space in 2016, and became a weekend Gallery Assistant in 2020. Benjamin is an active member of the arts community and is on the committee at Trocadero Art Space.

Board

Rosemary Willink, Chair

Rosemary Willink is an experienced creative industries executive, with expertise in strategy and program development, governance and digital. She is a non-executive director of Canstar, Australia’s largest comparison website helping consumers make better financial decisions.

Bala Starr, Deputy Chair

Bala Starr is an arts leader, most recently Director of the La Trobe Art Institute. Previously she was Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, steering contemporary art programs that promoted inquiry, experimentation and interrelations between Asian and international art practices, Senior Curator at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, and held an executive positions at the Melbourne International Biennial. Throughout her career, Bala has advocated for independent artists and curators, intergenerational exchange and overlooked objects and practices.

Sid Smith, Treasurer

Sid Smith is an experienced chartered accountant and creative industry executive specialising in capital management, strategic planning and financial transformation. His current role is in the live music industry with previous positions across performing arts, publishing and broadcasting.

James Nguyen

James Nguyen is an artist engaging with decolonial practice and minoritarian language-brokering. He makes work in collaboration with family and friends, inviting them to respond to specific sites using readily available materials. Processes of research and conversation play key roles in his practice, which examines strategies of decolonisation, while also interrogating the politics of family history, displacement and diaspora. James has presented across Australia and abroad since 2013, including Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou, 2014; Re-Tuning with Victoria Pham, Sydney Opera House, 2022; and Open Glossary, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2023.

Kim Phan

Kim Phan is a finance manager and bookkeeper, interested in working for the not-for-profit sector and supporting organisations making a positive impact. Kim had held various roles as Business Analyst and Internal Auditor in private sector including Toyota and BHP and later started her own business - Children’s Playcentre in Thailand where she also volunteered in Pattaya Orphanage and other charities including Redemptorist centre for children with disabilities.

Alicia Frankovich

Born in Aotearoa, based between Melbourne and Berlin, Alicia Frankovich is an artist working across sculpture, performance, video, photography and the format of the exhibition itself. Her work engages living human and non-human entities to reveal the limits of how we understand notions of nature.

Paris Lettau

Paris Lettau is a practising barrister, arts editor and writer. He is a co-founder and contributing editor of Memo Review, Index Journal, and Index Books.

Eugenia Lim

Eugenia Lim is an artist of Chinese-Singaporean descent who works across body, lens, social and spatial practice to explore how national identities, migration and capital cut, divide and bond our interdependent world. Her practice considers work, collectivity, technology and ethics – and art and capital as strange bedfellows. Eugenia has shown across the Tate Modern, Recontemporary (Turin), Kassel Dokfest, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia Cenre for Contemporary Art, ACMI, FACT Liverpool, and EXiS (Seoul). In 2024, Eugenia is an AIDC Leading Light, a Frame Documentary Lab participant, and one of 10 international directors selected for the prestigious Berlinale Talents Short Form Station 2024.

Jahkarli Romanis

Jahkarli Romanis is an emerging artist, researcher, and curator. After completing an Honours in Photography at RMIT in 2020, she commenced a PhD at Monash in 2021 through the Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab. Her work is inextricably intertwined with her identity as a proud Pitta Pitta woman and explores the complexities of her lived experience and the continuing negative impacts of colonisation in Australia.

Past Board Members

Melissa Loughnan, Nicholas Modrzewski, Nurin Veis, Kerrie Poliness, Joan Spiller, Tony Nagle, Sofi Basseghi, Sean Dockray, Tamsen Hopkinson, Padraig Donnelly, Jacqueline Doughty, Jan Bryant, Lou Hubbard, Charlie Sofo, Katie Lee, Cheree Tucker, Bill Gillies, Lyndal Walker, Terri Bird, Dominic Redfern, Evan Lowenstein, Brad Haylock, Stuart Geddes, Debra Main, Philip Samartzis, Rachel Young, Katarina Paseta, Ash Keating, Patrick Pound, Penelope Aitken, Cherie McNair, Cass Matthews, Arlo Mountford, Brett Jones, Matthew Self, Suzie Attiwill, Veronica Kent

Artist Committee

Aida Azin

Aida Azin is a painter and community organiser working between the Philippines, Naarm/Melbourne and Tandaya/Adelaide. Born to Iranian/Filipina parents and raised in an Australian context, her practice advocates for conversations about shame as a failing political tool, first-generation migrant guilt, racism, Whiteness, dreams, identity, food, and culture. Aida is a collaborating artist/organiser in Saluhan collective, fostering connections between artists within the Philippines and Filipinx diasporas across Australia.

Tristen Harwood

Tristen Harwood is an Indigenous writer, cultural critic and independent researcher, a descendent of Numbulwar where the Rose River opens onto the Gulf of Carpentaria. Tristen publishes essays, reviews and criticism on art, architecture, literature and film. His writing is published in The Monthly, ArtReview, Overland Journal, Art Almanac, Un Magazine, Metro magazine, Art + Australia and more. He is writing a book about ecology, myth and memory.

Joshua Pether

Joshua Pether is of Kalkadoon heritage and is an experimental performance artist, dancer and choreographer of movement, temporary ritual and imagined realties. His practice is influenced by his two cultural histories - Indigeneity and disability and the hybridisation of the two, with particular interest in the aesthetics of the disabled body and also that of the colonised body. Joshua joined Arts Access Victoria as CEO in 2024.

Sarah Poulgrain

Sarah Poulgrain is a Brisbane based artist who works across video installation, ceramics, sewing, animation and audio production. Her practice is motivated by a desire to better understand experiences of shame, she approaches skill sharing as a means for self empowerment.

Kaspar Schmidt Mumm

Born in Germany and raised in Adelaide with Colombian, Pakistani and Canadian heritage, Kaspar Schmidt Mumm’s motivation to make art stems from his experience of displacement and desire to develop an artistic language that crosses cultural borders. Kaspar is one of the founders of performance art collective The Bait Fridge and lead vocalist of Slowmango. He is currently studying a Masters focused on the intersection of contemporary art and social work at the Institute for Art in Context, Universität der Künste Berlin.

Past Artist Committee Members

Jahkarli Romanis, Sophie Cassar, Amrita Hepi, Mark Shorter, Kate ten Buuren, Saskia Doherty, Pip Wallis, Samira Farah, James Nguyen, Hannah Donnelly, Ashley Perry, Sophia Cai, Avni Dauti

Volunteers

Tasya Afifah, Asha Barr, Annabel Brown, Khaled Chamma, Keiran Molaeb, Florence Phillips, Gabriela Williams, Joy Zhou

Community of Supporters

West Space would like to thank our 2024 Supporters, who empower our organisation and ensure our sustainable future.

Transformative Supporters, $10,000+

Melissa Loughnan & Simon Griffiths

Commission Supporters, $5,000-$9,999

Joan Spiller & Philip Yetton
Jan van Schaik

Curated Project Supporters, $2,500-$4,999

Anonymous

Performance Supporters, $1,000-$2,499

Bala Starr
Ruth Trenerry
Rosemary Willink
Anonymous

Window Supporters, $500-$999

Ellen Koshland
Shelley McSpedden
Cherie Schweitzer
Leon van Schaik
Anonymous

Offsite Supporters, $250-$499

Akira Akira
Daniel Jumperz
Nicholas Mangan
Alia McBride
Anonymous

Community of Supporters, up to $249

Aida Azin
Kate Beynon
Kate Bonney
Jacqui Burnes
Aleks Chojnacki
Vivian Cooper
Rachel Earl
Phil and Mary Earl
Helen Grogan
Beau Lai
Eugenia Lim
Sim Luttin
Tahmina Maskinyar
Kyle Mcintyre
Christine McKervey
Nithya Nagarajan
Melissa Nguyen
Audrey Pfister
Lea Rose
Sid Smith
Amelia Wallin
Anonymous x 10

Join our Community of Supporters and make an impact on the future of contemporary art in Australia. All donations over $2 are tax deductible.

West Space is a not-for-profit organisation endorsed by the Australian Taxation Office as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR), registered with the Australian Charities & Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC).

If you'd like to speak with us about how you, your business or organisation can make an impact, contact Joanna on director@westspace.org.au