​2018 WPI SELECTED AUSTRALIAN DELEGATION - ARTIST BIOs

Dr Donna Abela 
Donna Abela is an award-winning playwright dedicated to staging stories that transcend ‘bad myths’ in our society, create cultural space for marginalised communities, enrich the diversity of the Australian repertoire, and are derived from lived and imagined experiences at play in our corner of the global south.
 
Her practice rejects conventional one-size-fits-all dramatic writing pedagogy, and instead, turns towards feminist theatre practices, language-driven playwriting, and ironic and dark comedy in order to develop a poetics which can efficaciously represent each cross-cultural narrative she seeks to bring to the stage. Donna’s practice is predicated on her belief that a play is a vehicle for imaginative travel in which the form is best discovered in the patterns and propositions of its content. This places innovation at the centre of her practice, and steers her work away from the “Anglo-realism” which has historically dominated Australian stages. Her early career writing with communities in a CACD and popular theatre context ensured that she became a versatile, socially-engaged writer with an ear for dialogue and comic timing, and an inclination to revel in theatre’s innate world of make-believe and serious interrogative fun.
 
Donna’s 2016 doctoral thesis, entitled Dialogic Interplay: a Strategy for Representing Difference and Cultural Diversity on Stage, explains how she worked with dialogic and associative dramaturgical structures to represent Arab-Australian and lesbian characters in her play Jump for Jordan. The play went on to win the 2013 Griffin Playwriting Award, the 2015 Australian Writers’ Guild’s AWGIE Award for Stage, and be included in the 2019-2022 HSC Drama Syllabus.
 
As a dramaturge, teacher and mentor, Donna is also passionate about leading inclusive and culturally safe processes that support the exploration and discovery of new dramatic works, leverage the creative proficiency and resilience of writers, and place diverse voices on our stages and screens.
 
Donna’s plays also include: Monkey ... Journey to the West (part of the 2014 Brisbane Festival, and 2015 Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Festival programs), Spirit (2016 AWGIE Award for Radio Adaptation), Caylee’s Ukulele (nominated 2014 AWGIE Award for Children’s Theatre), Aurora’s Lament (2012 AWGIE Award for Radio), and Mrs Macquarie’s Cello (2010 AWGIE Award for Radio). Tales from the Arabian Nights (nominated 2005 AWGIE Award for Children’s Theatre) continues to be a popular choice for schools and universities, and last year received its fifteenth stage production. Her plays have been published by Currency Press, The Federation Press, Longman-Pearson Education, Harper Collins UK and Meriwhether Publishing USA.
Emma Mary Hall
Emma Mary Hall is an actor and writer working between Adelaide and Melbourne. She has worked professionally in the performing arts since 2012 and began writing for theatre in 2015. Emma trained as a professional actor at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and holds an Honours degree in political science from the Australian National University in Canberra.
 
Emma has written, performed and toured two full length award-winning solo works: We May Have to Choose (2015) and Ode to Man (2017), both directed by Prue Clark. Her third work, World Problems, held its first development reading at the Cultureland Residency in Amsterdam in January 2018. Her writing plays with multiple truths, and contradiction within truth and language.  A common theme in Emma's writing is the way in which her own socio-politicised body connects to, and is the product of, broader social narratives, histories and contexts. Emma is influenced by artists working across theatre, comedy, live art, contemporary performance, and visual art who speak and subvert truth (for example Tim Etchells, Spalding Gray, David Shrigley, Charlie Kauffman, Martin Creed, Nicola Gunn, Daniel Kitson).
 
We May Have to Choose has toured internationally, was nominated for eight theatre awards, including the Perth Fringe 2016 WA Arts Editor Award, and has won six awards, including the 2015 Melbourne Festival Discovery Award. Ode to Man toured to Melbourne and Perth (Blue Room theatre development season), winning best emerging writer award at the 2017 Melbourne Fringe and a nomination for Best Performance.
 
Emma has performed in twelve other theatre productions since 2012, including five devised works and the solo Reach Out Touch Faith by Sarah Rodigari. Reach Out… won the 2014 Green Room Award for Best Contemporary and Experimental Performance.

Emma works across disciplines, performing in various experimental film and performance projects including Carousel at 2016 Melbourne Fringe, A+B at 2015 Gertrude St Projection Festival, Jesus! Live! Here! Tonight! #1 (Spinning) by Kat Henry and Nina Mulhall's You Came Out of Me, which was a finalist in the 2012 National Digital Portrait Award and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
 
Emma is building international audiences for her work and a profile as an advocate for Australian theatre. In 2016, Emma was selected by Tim Etchells (Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment) as one of 12 applicants worldwide to participate in a masterclass with him at the SPRING Festival in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In 2017, she was selected to attend the Australian Theatre Forum as an Independent Delegate. She attended her first IETM (International network for contemporary performing arts) forum in Brussels in late 2017. 
​Dr Grace Pundyk
Dr. Grace Pundyk is a Melbourne-based artist, performer, author and playwright. Her PhD research, titled ‘Invisible Words: the semaphore of skin’, drew on the mediums of photography, video, installation, theatre and artefacts of skin to interrogate the intergenerational impact of the ‘unspeakable’ traumas of a past war. It is from this research that Grace wrote her play Steppe (a journey of unforgetting), as well as embark on a ‘skin practice’, where she makes parchment sourced directly from marsupial roadkill in north-west Tasmania. Largely self-taught, in 2014 she undertook a mentorship with Pergamena, professional parchment makers in New York, and is currently curating a group exhibition of artists’ work on her parchment.
 
Grace describes her work as inhabiting a ‘strange periphery’: in ‘BIRDS’ she performed inside a giant birds nest (to the sound of birdsong); in Sita’s Garden, she danced kathak on a moving river barge, at 4am, amidst giant floating lotuses; and her play Steppe was staged inside a freight car at a rail yard. Books include the global travel narrative The Honey Trail (St Martin’s Press, 2010), and Sons of Sindbad: the photographs (Arabian Publishing, London, 2006). Sons of Sindbad was short-listed for the BRISMES Book Prize 2007 and was voted by The Times as one of the ‘Top 5 Photography Books of 2006’.

​Appearances at various festivals include Ten Days on the Island, the Melbourne Festival, White Night, and the Sydney and Brisbane writers festivals.
 
In 2013, Grace was selected for PWA’s Salon playwrights mentorship program. She was mentored by Melbourne playwright Melissa Reeves and her play was read under the direction of Chris Mead, at a public reading at Footscray Community Arts Centre.
 
Steppe was the result of her PWA Salon mentorship. It premiered at the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival and was short-listed for the national Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award 2016.