Our People
Melanie Swalwell
Professor of Digital Media Heritage, Swinburne University
Project Leader
Prof. Melanie Swalwell’s research focuses on the creation, use, preservation, and legacy of complex digital artefacts such as videogames and media artworks. Melanie has curated exhibitions and datasets, authored interactive essays, collected popular memories, and organised the preservation of digital artefacts.
Cynde Moya
Director, Digital Heritage Lab, Swinburne University
As Director of the Digital Heritage Lab, Dr Cynde Moya is developing workflows for imaging and emulation, implementing training and presenting research findings, and establishing the AusEaaSI community of practice. Cynde is active in the international software preservation community, and currently serves on the Coordinating Committee of the Software Preservation Network.
Adam Bell
Manager, Cultural Outreach, AARNet
Adam Bell enables cultural organisations to utilise AARNet’s national network, collaboration services and research technologies with a focus on Platform-as-a-Service. Adam has led collections discovery-and-access projects at the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Adam is a practising artist with a background in web development and fine art printmaking.
Simon Biggs
Adjunct Research Professor, University of South Australia
Chief Investigator
Prof. Simon Biggs is a visual artist, writer and curator working with new media. He creates interactive immersive environments, electronic literature, machine-learning augmented performance environments, internet-based art and computer animation. Simon has collborated with creative practitioners in dance and music, and experts in software engineering, physical sciences and social sciences on a number of reearch projects. http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
Margie Borschke
Senior lecturer in Media, University of Sydney
Chief Investigator
Dr Margie Borschke is the author of This is not a remix: piracy, authenticity and popular music (Bloomsbury 2017) and many other articles and chapters on the cultural history of digital media. Copying, circulation and collecting as cultural practices and the intersection of technology and culture are the focus of her research.
Erik Champion
Enterprise Fellow, University of South Australia
Chief Investigator
Associate Prof. Erik Champion leads the Playful Cultures Lab (UniSA IVE). He researches Digital Heritage and serious games, as well as architectural history and visualisation. A Fulbright Fellow and past UNESCO Chair, he is an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, an Emeritus Professor at Curtin University, Adjunct Professor at Universitas Bunda Mulia, Jakarta, and Honorary Professor of Games, Immersive Media & Extended Reality at the University of Salford, UK. He has written or edited 11 books, primarily in the fields of virtual heritage, digital humanities, and serious games.
Sean Cubitt
Professor of Screen Studies, The University of Melbourne
Chief Investigator
Prof. Sean Cubitt’s current research is on aesthetic politics, ecocritique, media arts and media technologies. Publications include The Cinema Effect (MIT Press, 2005), Ecomedia (Rodopi, 2005), The Practice of Light (MIT Press, 2014), Finite Media, Anecdotal Evidence and Truth (Duke University Press, 2016). Sean is Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press.
Roger Dean
Professor, Western Sydney University
Chief Investigator
Prof. Roger Dean’s research focuses on cognition of music and its computational modelling and generation, in relation to pitch, timbre, rhythm, intensity and affect. Roger is an accomplished musician and former biochemist who since 2007 has focused solely on musicology and music cognition. Roger was founder, and acts as a co-editor, of the online sound intermedia journal Soundsrite
Kirsten Day
Lecturer, University of Melbourne
Chief Investigator
Dr Kirsten Day researches the ‘contingent’ nature of the professional practice of architecture by examining the institutions that define what and who is an architect. and ensuring the preservation and accessibility of digital architectural collections for future generations. Kirsten’s research, teaching and architectural practice is committed to creating spaces that embrace neurodiversity and prioritise accessibility, She is principal architect at Norman Day + Associates. kirstenmday.com
Harriet Edquist
Professor, RMIT University
Chief Investigator
Prof. Harriet Edquist is an academic and historian with extensive experience in researching Australian, particularly Victorian, Architecture, Art and Design. Harriet has contributed to the production of Australian design knowledge by acting, for example, as founder and director of the RMIT Design Archives, founding editor of the RMIT Design Archives Journal, and as inaugural President of Automotive Historians Australia.
Stephanie Harkin
Lecturer, School of Design, RMIT University
Chief Investigator
Dr Stephanie Harkin researches girls’ digital cultures and feminine gaming histories. She was lead curator of the indie games exhibition Feminine Play (2024–2025) and is an executive board member of DiGRA Australia. Her forthcoming manuscript Girlhood Games: Gender, Identity and Coming of Age in Video Games will be published in 2025.
Kim Machan
Honorary Fellow, University of Queensland.
Chief Investigator
Dr Kim Machan is a video and media arts specialist, curator, and founding director of the not-for-profit arts organisation MAAP-Media Art Asia Pacific. She has researched, curated, produced, and commissioned media arts projects in Australia and the Asia regions through this organisation since 1998. As an extension of her curatorial work in video art, she worked with pioneering Australian and Asian artists using emergent technologies in the rise of the Internet since the 1990s. Her PhD focused on the rise of video art in East Asia.
Anna Munster
Professor Art & Design, UNSW, Sydney
Chief Investigator
Prof. Anna Munster’s current research interests are: statistical visuality and radical empiricism, the politics and aesthetics of machine learning, more-than-human perception, new pragmatist approaches to media and art, new media art environments and ecologies; time, movement and sonicity. Anna regularly collaborates artistically with Michele Barker working in multi-channel audiovisual environments exploring the relations between perception, movement and media.
Norie Neumark
Professor, The University of Melbourne
Chief Investigator
Prof. Norie Neumark is a sound/media artist and theorist whose sound studies research is recently focused on voice. Norie collaborates with Maria Miranda to explore human-animal relations and environmental politics and practices through sound, video and installation work (www.out-of-sync.com) and is founding editor of Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts.
Simon Polson
Executive Director, National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA)
Partner Investigator
Dr Simon Polson came to the library and information sector after working as a research strategist, supporting leading universities to advance knowledge creation and foster imagination. Simon’s doctorate on biographical history of the professional musicians of London in the later Middle Ages (c.1300-1550) involved archival research with rare books, manuscripts, and paleography.
Peter Raisbeck
Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne
Chief Investigator
Associate Prof. Peter Raisbeck’s research broadly spans the architectural profession, its history and future prospects with a particular interest in understanding the architectural profession’s present condition through its histories, theories and current dilemmas. Peter is currently the research director of the Architects Consulting Association, and maintains strong ties to industry having successfully completed a number of landmark industry reports.
Ash Robertson
Executive Director, Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMaGA) Victoria
Partner Investigator
With 15 years’ experience in cultural heritage, digitisation, and public access, Dr Ash Roberston is a passionate advocate for a vibrant, inclusive, and sustainable sector. Ash contributes to sector development through leadership and advisory roles, serving as Chair of Deakin University’s Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies Advisory Board, and as a member of both the Arts Industry Council of Victoria and the Indigo Shire Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee.
Helen Stuckey
Senior Lecturer, RMIT University
Chief Investigator
Dr Helen Stuckey’s research addresses game history and the curation and collection of videogames. Helen was the inaugural Games Curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (2004-2009)
Elizabeth Tait
Associate Professor of Information Management, University of South Australia; Adjunct Associate Professor, Charles Sturt University
Chief Investigator
Associate Prof. Elizabeth (Lizzy) Tait’s main area of expertise relates to the digital transformation of business and culture through the application of technologies such as: AI, reality capture technologies, 3D visualisation and linked data. She is especially interested in the impact of these on the GLAMR profession and professional roles in the sector.
Sarah Teasley
Professor of Design, RMIT University
Chief Investigator
Prof. Sarah Teasley researches across history, design research and social practice, with particular interests in the lived experience of old new biomaterials and biotechnologies in global circulation, and in how human and non-human power relations shape experience, within and as the result of design projects. Sarah has extensive experience in industry and cross-disciplinary academic partnerships with museums, charities and design researchers and practitioners, and in consultancy for museums, government and the private sector.
Kim Vincs
Senior Principal Research Fellow, Swinburne University
Chief Investigator
Prof. Kim Vincs is a dancer, choreographer and interactive media artist whose research integrates scientific and artistic approaches across dance, biomechanics, mathematics and cognitive psychology. As previous Director of Deakin Motion.Lab and the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies, Kim developed new and ground-breaking creative arts research models and built the innovative, motivated and successful academic teams needed to deliver on these initiatives.
Caroline Wilson-Barnao
Director of Museum Studies, University of Queensland
Chief Investigator
Dr Caroline Wilson-Barnao is the author of ‘”Digital Access and Museums as Platforms” (2022) and has a new coauthored book “Collecting Social Media: From object to content” (forthcoming, 2025). She has written a range of related articles on the digitisation of cultural practices including “The quantified and customised museum: measuring, matching and aggregating audiences” (2020); “The logic of platforms: how on demand museums are adapting in the digital era” (2018); “How algorithmic cultural recommendation influence the marketing of cultural collections (2017); and “The personalisation of publicity in the museum” (2016).
Ionat Zurr
Associate Professor, The University of Western Australia
Chief Investigator
Associate Prof. Ionat Zurr is an artist researcher who is considered to be a pioneer and a leader in the field of Biological Arts (or bioart). Ionat critically explores the aesthetic, ethical and cultural implications of using life as a technology and its effects on bodies and ecologies. Ionat is academic coordinator of SymbioticA and formed, together with Oron Catts, the Tissue Culture and Art Project.