_{I pay my respects to the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, Turrbal and Yuggera Peoples, their Ancestors and Elders, on whose unceded lands my practice has unfolded. I recognise the care, knowledge and community that First Nations People have nurtured across generations, lands and waterways, and continue to sustain today. Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land. Pay the rent.}

Dr Jacina Leong 梁玉明 is an artist-curator, researcher and educator working across cultural, education and social impact contexts. Her practice examines how cultural organisations facilitate gathering in response to crisis, while interrogating the systemic conditions that shape arts and cultural work. Drawing on 18 years of experience in organisational leadership, transdisciplinary research and socially engaged creative practice, she engages questions of social infrastructure and infrastructural critique; the entanglement of climate crisis, burnout and arts labour; and the politics and ethics of care. She is also concerned with what it means to sustain practice, and toward what ends, often thinking with meridians, breath and composting as metaphor, method and ethic.

Selected Work.

Jacina is currently a Research Fellow at RMIT University, working on the ARC Discovery Project Making Histories: Young People as Visual Historians of Changing Cities. She also lectures in contemporary art theory within the School of Art, serves as Chair of the School of Art Industry Advisory Committee, and is a co-author of the forthcoming book Museums and Digital Social Futures: Audience Experiences in Everyday Life (Routledge). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) and a Master’s by Research from QUT, and a PhD from RMIT University.

Selected Partnerships and Collaborators.

Jacina lives in Narrm/Melbourne with her effervescent dog, Soda. She has ancestry that connects her to Guangdong, Hong Kong, Puglia, England and Ireland. How she sees the world, relates to this colonised country (so-called Australia), and understands her response as a settler-migrant, artist-curator, educator and researcher are shaped, in part, through these interesecting lineages.

_{Find me elsewhere online: LinkedIn and Substack.}