About Us - Voices of Women

What’s your story? Our mission is to empower women in a safe and supportive space to
share their unique stories and connect with their inner creative selves, tapping into and
discovering their full potential. By connecting with others, we build resilience and capacity, while inspiring understanding, empathy and tolerance.

Voices of Women is a not-for-profit organisation run by a Management Board and Advisory Boards. Since 2018, Voices of Women has been empowering women to build confidence and connect with each other through cross cultural creative writing and performance workshops, public readings, live shows and short films. Inspired by women’s life stories, the organisation supports and inspires women across Australia and internationally to share their story, to make sense of our world, deepen our understanding, break down barriers and experience compassion and joy.

Through seven annual story call outs and an extensive workshop program, Voices of Women has encouraged over 1,000 women in Australia and internationally to create and share their story in short monologue form.

The organisation is supported by Australian Federal, state and local government bodies, private donors and foundations and an extensive network of collaborating arts organisations.

Our first feature film CLEARWAY (CORONA) (2020) was made and screened in Sydney. The award-winning feature film Entanglement was made in 2021, along with four Australian shorts Our Mob, Invisibility, The Dress, Sun in My Bones, Queen Bessie’s Gal, and eight international shorts We Are Still Here, The Dress, Isolation in Lockdown, Fully Present, Body and Breath, Now You See Me, Trap Musik and On Being Twelve.

Entanglement and the short films have won film festival awards and commendations in Europe, Australia, North America and the United States and was screened at The United Nations Womens Conference in Rwanda 2023. Voices of Women Artistic Director Lliane Clarke was presented with the NSW Arts and Culture Medal in 2022 for the Entanglement program.

Voices of Women is committed to live productions of stories. Its first show Secrets, Longings, Triumphs (2018); was followed by EDGE Activation (2019, then the Amplify (2022) tour to Wagga Wagga Gallery, Dubbo Fringe and Goulburn. In 2023 Voices of Women launched the story call out for Embellishment with guest speakers Antoinette Latouf and Bina Bhattacharya, and presented Embellishment live at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Studio 138 Dubbo and at KXT Broadway Sydney.

In 2024 Voices of Women presented Connection Workshops in Dubbo and Newcastle Writers Festival, launched the first Film Fest, continued the annual Story Call Out, and is presenting Women of the Riverina at KXT Broadway and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery.

Voices of Women Podcast and Sound Stories is available on Apple Podcasts.

Lliane Clarke

Lliane is the Artistic Director of Voices of Women which she created and has directed since 2018. With a passion for the written and spoken word, she is a journalist, published author, producer and director, communications and marketing consultant in the performing arts, and author mentor in commercial publishing and creative programs. Since 2020, she has directed 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 from Multicultural NSW for the Entanglement program. She has created collaborative scripts for live shows since 2018, including regional tours of Amplify in 2022, Entanglement Live in 2023, and Embellishment in 2023 at KXT Broadway in Sydney in 2023.

Jeanne Kinninmont

Jeanne is an experienced business project manager and consultant, and is the Treasurer of Voices of Women. Jeanne has wide-ranging experience and interests in business consulting, business writing and communications, project management, financial management, preparing business plans and generally working with business managers to improve results and effectiveness. She is Business Manager at Writing NSW, and has been Director Project Words, General Manager Moorambilla Voices and Senior Project Manager APRA. Jeanne is also a keen photographer.

Hasitha Adhikariarachchi

Hasitha Adhikariarachchi is an emerging writer and poet. Raised in Sri Lanka, she now calls Sydney home. Inspired by futility of everyday sexism, her work includes plays, poetry and short fiction. 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’. Hasitha’s piece, The Greyhound, the Dark-Bearded Man and the Wind, was selected for ‘The Monologue Adventure-Voices of Women’ organised by Content and Cultural Projects. Last year she won the ‘NSW Multilingual Poetry Slam 2017’.

Michele Seminara

Michele is a poet, editor and has been published in a poetry collection Engraft (Island Press, 2016), collaborative chapbook Scar to Scar (with Robbie Coburn, PressPress, 2016) & HUSH (Blank Rune Press, 2017). She recently published a collection of her poetry with UWA Publishing, Suburban Fantasy.

Di Bird

Di Bird is a proud Gomeroi woman who is a singer/performer, grandmother and storyteller who regularly performs with her band in shows across Sydney. Di wrote and performed Invisibility in the Voices of Women feature film Entanglement. She is also First Nations advisor to the Voices of Women storytelling workshop program.

Natalie Rose

Natalie is one third of the performance collective called ‘post’, and is Creative Director at Shopfront Arts Co-op. Natalie has been involved in Australia’s contemporary arts scene for the past 21 years. Her work has been seen nationally and internationally at Sydney Festival, Belvoir, Sydney Theatre Company, Malthouse Theatre, Cambridge Junction (UK) and Sydney Opera House, to name a few. Most recently with post, Oedipus Schmoedipus has toured to Santiago Chile, West Kowloon Cultural Precinct Authority in Hong Kong and in 2020 was to be showcased as a part of AsiaTOPA at Arts Centre Melbourne. Their 2017 Sydney Festival work Ich Nibber Dibber was remounted at Sydney Opera House and Malthouse Theatre. Nat has facilitated workshops for the past 21 years for young and emerging artists with and without disability. Nat has a Bachelor of Arts (Theatre-making) from the University of Western Sydney, Nepean and has previously trained at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists and Urban Theatre Projects as a member of their ensembles. In 2021, for Shopfront, she will direct Tiny Universe and The Lies We Were Told and begin creative development with the Harness Ensemble towards their third full length work. Natalie is a Committee Member of Voices of Women Incorporated.

Victoria Kennedy

Victoria is a proud member of the Wongaibon clan of south-west NSW, an actor and health professional. As an actor, she is known for Redfern Now (2012) and Bony (1992). She performed in a theatre production at the Weimar Kunst Festival Germany, and in Close to the Bone at Q Theatre. She is currently a Board member of Mooghalin Performing Arts, and continues to work within the arts community. Victoria performed The Dress in the Voices of Women feature film Entanglement and advises the program on First Nations storytelling.

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Voices of Women collaborates and consults regularly with members of its Advisory Committee.

Clare Grant OAM

Clare has been an actor and advisor in the project since 2018. She has been involved in the creation of new works for theatre, radio and film for many years. She worked for two years with KISS Theatre Group in Europe. She was a founding member of The Sydney Front. Her solo performance Woman in the Wall has been presented in Sydney and in New Zealand. She was Co-director then Artistic Director of Playworks (1994-7) and served on the Theatre Committee of the NSW Arts Advisory Council (1994-6) and Theatre Fund, Australia Council (1996-99). Other performance work includes Burn Sonata (1998) and Inland Sea (devised with and directed by Nikki Heywood) (2000), Laquiem (composed and directed by Andree Greenwell from writing by Kathleen Mary Fallon) (1999). She has collaborated with John Gillies on the live performance of Prelude to the Mary Stuart Tapes 1998 and 1999 and the film The Mary Stuart Tapes (Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals) (2000). Clare has been a lecturer in performance at UNSW since 1998. She was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 2021 for services to performing arts.

Alison Muir

Alison is an effective and successful professional fundraiser whose strategies and initiatives have raised $60M through major gifts, bequests, grants, for not-for-profit and charitable organisations in the higher education, health, arts and social justice sectors. Her expertise includes designing customised fundraising strategies, building and strengthening donor relations, campaign design, appeals, special events, communications and media including writing and filmmaking. Alison writes and performs comedy and develops film scripts and was a volunteer co-presenter and co-producer on 2SER-FM on arts program Entertainment Magazine for five years and in 1992 created the program Final Draft (about writing – all kinds), which is still running on 2SER today.

Jeanne Ryckmans

Jeanne Ryckmans has worked for two decades in Australian publishing. A literary agent and co-founder of Key People Literary Management, she is a former senior publisher at Random House and HarperCollins Australia. Prior to joining the publishing world, she worked for seven years in arts television (France 2/SBS Television) as an on-air presenter and documentary producer, and was features editor at ELLE Magazine and books editor for Vogue Australia. She is the author of three books including Trust: A Fractured Fable (Upswell Publishing 2023) and was Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival from 2020-2022.

Kaye Tuckerman

Kaye Tuckerman is based in New York City, and continues to work throughout the USA, Canada, London, Europe, Australia. Kaye is a graduate of Australia’s two most prestigious arts institutions: WAAPA – Bachelor of Arts Music Theatre and NIDA – Post Graduate Diploma Directing.She has directed multiple theatre productions throughout Australia and Asia, and most recently has directed the short films: Fragile, Black Canvas, Permission, Still Here, Trumped. She was Co-Director and Co-Producer of the Voices of Women feature film Entanglement and directed the shorts On Being Twelve, Isolation in Lockdown, Body and Breath, Now You See Me, Trap Musik and Queen Bessie‘s Gal.

Upasna Ved

Upasna is an emerging Director and Producer. Her film Cotton Widows is in production and is about the suicide rate of Indian cotton farmers and the stories of survival of the widows they leave behind. Read more here.

Yvette Henry Holt

Yvette Henry Holt is a multi-award-winning poet, essayist, editor, stand-up comedienne, and femin_artist photographer of erotic desert landscapes and queer votive imagery. Heralding from the Yiman, Wakaman and Bidjara Nations’ of Queensland, her poetry has been widely published, translated, anthologised, and reviewed in print and online domestically and internationally. In 2005 Yvette was awarded the David Unaipon Award for her manuscript anonymous premonition (UQP), the debut collection then went on to win the Victorian Premier’s Literary for Indigenous Writing in 2008, Scanlon Poetry Prize NSW 2008, and the Kate Challis RAKA Award 2010. In 2018 Yvette’s poem mother(s) native tongue was Highly Commended for the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Award – Queensland Poetry. Yvette’s research, editorial and writing contribution toward the field of Aboriginal literature, more emphatically poetry, and Indigenous women’s leadership spans over twenty-years across all states and territories of Australia.

INTERNSHIP

Voices of Women’s Artistic Director and Committee are keen to mentor and share their skills with younger women or women wanting to work in this space.

Vale (Aunty) Kerry Reed Gilbert

Voices of Women will always remember and respect with love and gratitude the support and inspiration of the extraordinary woman (Aunty) Kerry Reed Gilbert (deceased). Kerry was a respected and much-loved Aboriginal Elder, Matriarch, and Warrior of the Wiradjuri Nation, from Central New South Wales, a writer, activist, poet, mother, grandmother and great grandmother. Her work has been performed nationally and internationally. She was the inaugural Chairperson of the First Nations Australians Writers Network (FNAWN) in 2012 and continued as Patron. She gave the permission for her work When the Bell Tolls to be read and published at VOICES OF WOMEN 2019. The work was read by guest artist Teena McCarthy. Read about her biography The Cherry Pickers Daughter published by Wild Dingo Press.

Kerry compiled and edited a collection of First Nations voices from across Australia titled A Pocketful of Leadership in First Nations Australia Communities 2017. Her poetry and prose have been published in many journals and anthologies nationally and internationally and has been translated in French, Korean, Bengali, Dutch and other non-English speaking languages. She was an immensely positive force for change. Read one of her last podcasts with Michele Seminara on Verity La here. Anita Heiss wrote a beautiful eulogy which you can read here.

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