Rebecca Conroy works in an interdisciplinary manner as a director, curator, producer, researcher and writer across community, experimental site-based events, discursive practices, and intercultural collaborations. For more than a decade she has been a vital part of the artist run scene in Sydney, co founding and directing The Wedding Circle and Bill+George, as well as Gang Festival, a creative exchange with Indonesian artist run spaces and a site specific festival in Sydney (2005 – 2008). From 2008-2010 she was Associate Director of Performance Space and since then has worked freelance for a range of arts organisations as dramaturge, researcher, writer and provocateur.

Rebecca has been sought after as a creative and critical thinker in interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts, and has been active in developing an artist led practice and philosophy in Australia, the USA and South East Asia. She has worked with many key arts organisations in Australia: Performance Space, Campbelltown Art Centre, Pact Theatre, ArtSpace, Urban Theatre Projects, Watch this Space, Lismore Regional Art Gallery, as well as collaborating with many leading artists in Sydney and internationally. As an independent scholar and practitioner she has worked with the University of Newcastle, University of New South Wales, Western Sydney University, National Arts School, University of Technology Sydney and the University of Toronto.

From 2011 – 2014 she was the director of the large scale experimental art housing project Yurt Empire funded through the Australia Council for the Arts which sought to occupy a ‘wasteland’ space in Sydney and build a series of tiny homes inspired by the Mongolian Ger. Following this, she spent time focused on a range of projects about Libraries and Laundromats which investigate artist led practice at the intersection of economies and archiving. For this she conducted a covert paid internship in 2015 at a Laundromat in Sydney to learn more about the business model and to see how it can be hijacked and re-engineered as an artist run shared equity model for the feast and famine economy.

Between May – September 2015, Rebecca traveled across North America and Europe on four Australia Council funded residencies and practice led research projects to connect with artists and thinkers working with economy. She also went on several dates with Economists as part of her project Dating an Economist, which was commissioned as an audio piece for Radio National in 2016.

With other collaborators in April 2016, she built the Bike-Book-Machine—a nomadic library on wheels. For this she also curated a series of intimate public conversations ranging from archiving, radical municipalities and ‘doing economy differently’ at the Marrickville artist-run space The Frontyard. At this same space during 2017 she has been running an artist led Marrickville School for Economics, which travelled to London in July and August 2017 to feature in the Live Art Development Agency DIY series of artist professional development program. Later that year in November, she premiered a new work The Iron Lady commissioned by PADA (Adelaide) and presented by Vitalstatistix (Adelaide).

Currently, developing plans for an Artist Run Laundromat called Money Laundering, and new ideas about distributed leadership models for the small to medium art sector in the form of Common Praxis.

FULL CV Bio_CV_CONROY_2019