Field Theory is an award-winning collective of Australian artists committed to making and supporting projects that cross disciplines, shift contexts and seek new strategies for engaging with the public sphere. Our work is a combination of making, performing, curating and producing that responds to the unique conditions of specific times and places. We are passionate about collaborative processes and art that is embedded. We’re excited by methods of communication, time, change and unpredictable content. We believe in making things happen.
We won a Green Room award for our curatorial project Site is Set (and numerous nominations for works within this program), we were jointly awarded the Melbourne Prize for Sculpture and won the People’s choice awards and were named Cultural Leaders in the field of Live Art by the Australia Council. We have presented work with Melbourne Festival, City of Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Federation Square, Arts House, Melbourne Fringe, Next Wave, Performance Space, Sunshine Coast Council, The Wired Lab, Kingston Council and The Physics Room (NZ).
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Jackson Castiglione
Jackson Castiglione (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, film, podcasts and public art. His practice regularly celebrates ‘ordinary people’ in the creation and performance of original works that are collaborative and process oriented.
Guided by a sense of curiosity and open-endedness, Jackson’s work as a director and creative content producer champions community, the voices of children and perspectives that are playful, subversive and life-affirming.
Jackson lives in Naarm (Melbourne)
Working with young performers Jackson has created collaborated to adapt The Dispute conceived by Mohamed El Khatib in which children tell the stories of their parent’s separation for RISING Festival. An interventionist performance for a children’s dance competition Rainbow Leprechaun! A live chat show featuring child hosts with Born in a Taxi and co-created and directed two seasons of the podcast series Kids Vs Art.
Jackson has also co-directed Show & Tell, a short documentary made in collaboration with 10 children which screened at KUKI Children’s International Film Festival, Berlin.
He has made and shown work in urban and regional areas both in Victoria and Australia with major cultural institutions such as Rising Festival, Arts Centre Melbourne, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne International Arts Festival, National Gallery of Victoria, Inter-Film Berlin, Federation Square, Arts House, Performance Space and Next Wave Festival.
Jackson’s work has been recognised through awards sharing The Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture (in collaboration with Field Theory) and the SPARK Award for films in Education at KUKI, nominations for Melbourne Green Room Awards and the Streamy Awards (Los Angles, USA). His work has also been selected for presentations in international festivals.
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Sarah Rodigari
Sarah Rodigari is an artist whose practice addresses the social and political potential of art. Their work is site responsive, employing, durational live action, improvisation, and dialogical methodologies to produce text-based performance and installations. Rodigari has worked with and within various contexts and institutions. These include the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), the 20th Biennale of Sydney, MUMA, Melbourne International Arts Festival, ACCA, The Poetry Project (NYC) and SOMA (Mexico City). Rodigari holds a PhD in Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong and is member of the collective Field Theory.
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Martyn Coutts
Martyn Coutts is an artist, researcher and educator.
Martyn’s creative work develops strategies to bring audiences and performance into relation with each other, beyond the traditional bounds of the theatre. These digital dramaturgies place the body at the centre of expansive, immersive experiences which aim to connect us to a greater understanding of our world and ourselves. His projects have been shown extensively all over Australia and internationally in Taiwan, China, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, UK, US, Canada and the Netherlands.
Martyn is an award-winning video designer for theatre. He lectures in Digital Media and Projection at Australia’s pre-eminent fine art institution, the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) .
He is also a much sought after dramaturg for theatre and dance, collaborating on over 30 projects over a decade.
Martyn holds a postgraduate diploma in Animateuring (Theatre Making) from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and won the Dean’s Award for Excellence for his Masters in Arts Management from RMIT in 2021. His research focus was on the cultural and creative sectors in Hong Kong and how they intersect with national identity and soft power.
Martyn is a PhD candidate at University of Melbourne. The provisional PhD title is Creative Solidarities – An analysis of how digital media artworks inspired pro-democracy movements in the Asia-Pacific 2019 - 2021.
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Lara Thoms
I am interested in socially engaged, site-specific and participatory possibilities in contemporary art and performance.
Many of my projects work with people beyond the arts. I have made work with a 70 year old popstar, Indonesian Metallica fans, an 87yr old television broadcaster, Western Australian women's clubs, children in detention on Nauru and 150 people who visited public libraries and invited me back to their homes.
Elements of exchange, politics, humour and dialogue are important in my work. Some of my projects are performative across forms of installation and video such a large scale socially engaged artwork in Hurstville shopping mall made with local teenagers as part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts c3west program. Others work in traditional theatre spaces, with the intention to disrupt audience expectations of such sites.
I also work as an artist in Field Theory and am a co-director of Aphids. For ten years I have also been a curator and producer for organistations including Dark Mofo, Supplefox, Next Wave and Performance Space.
All of my projects sit within the common theme of reconsidering social hierarchies and highlighting the unexpected and being responsive to these sites.
My work has been presented with Perth International Arts Festival, Artshouse, Gertrude Contemporary, The Malthouse, Next Wave festival, the MCA, Performance Space, Radial System v Berlin, as well as multiple venues and institutions.
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Jason Maling
Jason Maling is an artist, writer and teacher based in Melbourne Australia. His work is a conceptually driven mix of object making, performance and social process that responds to the unique conditions of places and people.
Working collaboratively across multiple forms Jason builds platforms that facilitate live encounters. His work has been described as systems of agency balanced between comedy and critique. He is fascinated by the boundaries of play, the art of invitation and the creative potential in fluid form.
Jason acknowledges the traditional owners of the land where he lives and works, the Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. He pays his respects to Elders past and present, and celebrates the stories, culture and traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders of all communities who also work and live on this land.
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Anna Schoo
Anna is a producer and arts professional with broad ranging practice, including programming and producing for experimental and mainstream contexts, and extensive business and production management experience.
Varying widely in scale and sector, her work has included being the program manager for the inaugural White Night Melbourne, programming the inaugural festival for The School of Life Australia, programming NYE celebrations for the City of Melbourne, being part of many delivery teams for The Melbourne Festival, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Dark Mofo, and Garden of Unearthly Delights (Adelaide Fringe Festival), and has been on the road for many years as part of several large-scale touring productions.
She holds a postgraduate degree in performance creation from the VCA, was the Creative Producer for rural NSW based experimental arts company The Wired Lab from 2017-2024, has been a member of Field Theory since 2011, and is on the Board of A is for Atlas.
Current roles include being the Executive Producer for companies Born in a Taxi and Strange Engine.
Anna focuses on supporting Australian contemporary creative practice, and chooses work that extends her, emphasising the local and creating positive change.