Hasitha Adhikariarachchi is a spoken word artist. Raised in Sri Lanka, she now calls Sydney home. Hasitha was the runner-up of the Poetry Section of International Women’s Day Writing Competition by South Coast Writers Centre and has been featured by the Macquarie University in ‘Emerging Writers Festival – 2018’ and ‘South Asian Film, Arts & Literature Festival – 2017’. Her monologue piece, The Greyhound, the Dark-Bearded Man and the Wind, was selected to be performed for ‘The Monologue Adventure’, Voices of Women 2018. She won the NSW Multilingual Poetry Slam in 2017. Her debut children’s book, Mr and Mrs Dingiri Rabbit, was published in 2021. In addition, her short fiction and poetry have been featured in various anthologies and online journals.
Lliane Clarke is the Artistic Director of Voices of Women which she created in 2018. With a passion for diverse written and spoken stories, she is a journalist, published author, producer, director, and author mentor as well as a communications consultant in the performing arts. Since 2020, she has directed diverse community workshop programs focussing on women’s stories across regional NSW, in Australia and in the US. She directed the feature film CLEARWAY (CORONA) in 2020, the award-winning feature film Entanglement in 2021, shown around the world in film festivals, including at The United Nations Womens Conference in Rwanda and screened on SBS and NITV in 2024, and the short films Our Mob, Invisibility, The Dress and Sun in My Bones in 2021. In 2022 she was awarded the Carla Zampatti Arts and Culture Medal NSW for Entanglement.
She has devised collaborative multicultural community-based scripts for live performance since 2018, including Amplify in 2022, Entanglement Live in 2023, Embellishment in 2023 at KXT Broadway Sydney in 2023, and Women of the Riverina at KXT Broadway and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2024.
Samantha Sirimanne Hyde was born in Sri Lanka and now lives in the unceded land of the Wallumedegal people in NSW. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing, has published free verse, short fiction and a novel, The Lyrebird’s Cry. Her Japanese genre poetic forms have appeared in many publications.
Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer and author of Song of the Sun God, The Barrier, Safe Haven, Unfinished Business and Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, for which she won the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2023. She spent two decades working as a lawyer in the social justice field, on national and international program design. She continues her work in social impact for an Australian retailer and is researching her new novel. She is the deputy chair of Writing NSW, and lives in Sydney with her husband and her four children.
Elizabeth Jigalin’s music has been premiered at festivals around the world including Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Extended Play, Darmstadt, BIFEM, Rouse Hills Psychedelia, Percussive Arts Society International Convention, Women of Noise and Australia’s Silent Film Festival. She is Composer-in-Residence for Voices of Women, including composing the film score for the award-winning Entanglement film, and in the Moorambilla Voices program in 2023 and 2024. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Sydney Youth Orchestras, Bundanon Trust, Campbelltown Arts Centre and Bondi Pavillion. Previously, her music and ideas have been brought to life by a variety of performers and commissioners including Biennale of Sydney, Inner West Voices, Vanessa Tomlinson, Will Hansen, Jane Aubourg, Ensemble Offspring, Soundstream, Screen Dive, Lost in Books and FBI’s All the Best.
Elizabeth is the founder of creative music collective the music box project who were awarded Excellence for Experimental Music at the 2020 APRA AMCOS/AMC Art Music Awards for shallow listening. Elizabeth was the co-festival director of the music box project’s inaugural festival CUT PASTE PLAY – featuring over 25 artists from across Australia and abroad. She is the recipient of several awards including 2023 APRA/AMCOS Art Music Fund, Ars Musica Australis Scholarship, AAO Mentorship, 1st Prize Centenary of Canberra Composition Competition and 1st Prize Unbound Flute Festival competition. In 2022, Elizabeth was a finalist in the APRA Professional Development awards.