Collecting Photography

Speakers

• Andy Dinan (AU)

  Andy is a gallery director and place making and public art specialist who is passionate about cultural diversity and opportunities for women in the arts. She founded and established MARS Gallery, a cutting-edge commercial gallery, in 2004, where she supports, exhibits, and promotes the careers of emerging and mid-career contemporary Australian artists. MARS regularly stages exhibitions – more than 220 featuring over 330 artists to date. Andy established placemaking consultancy ADA Consulting in 2010 after identifying a niche for public art and placemaking in the market. In 2014, Andy was chosen as one of 100 Women of Influence in the Australian Financial Review and Westpac 100 Women of Influence Awards. Andy chaired the Arts Centre Melbourne Ovation fundraiser in 2018 and 2020. Andy believes that art can be a vehicle for education, re-education, and positively impacting public and private opinion, and aims to raise cultural richness for Australians of all backgrounds. She has been on the board at the Arts Centre Melbourne since 2018.

• Honey Long & Prue Stent (AU)

  Born 1993, Sydney, Australia
  Lives and works Melbourne, Australia

  Since 2010 multidisciplinary artists Honey Long and Prue Stent have worked together across photography, performance, installation and sculpture. Spontaneous and playful, their art centres on a fascination with gender and the body, and seeks to undermine notions of the passive female. Interested in the poetics and symbolism which arise from material and bodily processes, feelings of transience, permeability and transmutation permeate much of their work. They employ the body and unconventional materials to distort and fragment the bodily form, often with unexpected outcomes. Dreamy, fluid, saccharine, gritty and fleshy, Long and Stent challenge and captivate audiences with powerful imagery that crosses the subversive and the surreal.

• Alana Kushnir (AU)

  Alana is an art lawyer, advisor and curator based in Melbourne, Australia. She is the Founder and Director of Guest Work Agency, Australia’s first dedicated art law firm and Guest Club, a membership network for art lovers and collectors. She is also the Principal Investigator of the Serpentine Galleries R&D Platform Legal Lab She is a Board Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), a regular writer on art news and exhibition reviews for Broadsheet Media, and a co-writer of The Law Gorgeous: Your Art World Questions Answered by Us for The Art Gorgeous.

• Jessica Velasquez (AU)

  Jessica Velasquez is a director of James Makin Gallery. Over her twenty years experience in the gallery industry, Jessica has developed a strong focus upon client and artist relationships, viewing this to be one of the most important aspects of working in the arts. Appointed director of James Makin Gallery in 2021, Jessica is dedicated to developing a strong and dynamic contemporary art destination for artists and collectors.