Meet the team

Meet Charlotte Boulus, a 2023 member of the Newcastle Youth Advisory Art Gallery Group. With a strong background in graphic design, marketing and event management, Charlotte has spent the last five years working as the Marketing Manager on creative projects in the music and hospitality industry. Outside of her 9-5, she works as a freelance social media manager and events photographer in the Newcastle area.

In addition to her creative pursuits, Charlotte is extremely passionate about working with people with disabilities and promoting inclusivity. She currently teaches at a SSP (Schools for Specific Purposes) and spent the last two years of high school co-founding a non-profit organisation that held events to raise money for local and international charities. Charlotte brings her expertise and passion to the Newcastle Youth Advisory Art Gallery Group and is excited to create inclusive and accessible experiences for young people.

In her future career, Charlotte aspires to continue growing her skills in the creative field, particularly in graphic design and creative direction, and utilising her knowledge and experience in Special Education to create inclusive and accessible experiences for all.

Raffi is an emerging artist whose practice involves painting, drawing and ceramics. Mundane life and wicked problems influence Raffi’s current artmaking practice, often responding to global concerns in a juxtaposed playful manner. Raffi has trained in Visual Arts and is currently studying ceramics at Newcastle Art School.

Nicola Ford is an emerging contemporary dance artist based in Newcastle, Australia. Nicola has featured in many performances across various performing art disciplines, including dance, physical theatre and immersive theatre both Nationally and Internationally.

Her recent dance credits include ‘Drift’, Catapult Dance Choreographic Hub (2021), ’Awkward’, Catapult Dance Choreographic Hub (2021), ‘Acquist’, Catapult Dance Choreographic Hub (2021), ‘Home Bodies’, Dance Makers Collective (2021), Mea Culpa’, Cloe [F] Projects/ Form Dance Projects (2019). Additionally, Nicola has also collaborated as a choreographer and Movement Director on Film Sets, Music Videos and Live Performance shows. Nicola has worked on projects such as: ‘Totally, completely fine’  Freemantle Australia (2022), ‘Rachel Maria Cox’ (2022). 

Nicola holds a Bachelor of Dance Performance, Diploma of Pilates and rehabilitation and is currently studying a Bachelor of Occupational Therapy (Honours). 

Alex Golden is an emerging multidisciplinary artist and aspiring arts producer, who has worked with numerous institutions and creative professionals across Sydney and Newcastle. She has volunteered at independent art-space, The Lock-Up since early 2021 and is curating their annual fundraising exhibition, COLLECT for 2023.

Last year she was a part of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ 2022 Youth Collective and graduated from The University of Newcastle with a Bachelor’s of Communication with Distinction majoring in Media Arts Production.

Currently, Alex is developing new artistic work whilst continuing to explore her interests in arts programming and curation.

Bronte Naylor’s interdisciplinary practice is based in expanded collage; bringing together painting, photography, performance, intervention, social practice, spatial installation, and digital media. Her practice-led research is a continuous dialogue between studio practice and the Antipodean public and private space. Using post-post-studio methodologies, Naylor questions society's validation of authority and hierarchy of place, resources, and expressions of outward positivity in the face of a contrasting reality.

Her recent body of work ‘Counterweight’ and more generally, her practice is a site-specific response to the post-industrial and infrastructural landscape, in this case, Awabakal and Wormi land (Newcastle), where she lives and works.

Naylor’s work points to the reverse ruin of modern Australia, with particular attention paid to the Western unfamiliarity and denial of mourning. She supposes that ruins of modernity, cement and construction debris, like the human body are a vessel and a paradox of the temporal and historic. A memory of the past and a marker of the passage of time. The artist uses expanded collages to compare emotional anxieties surrounding love, mourning, and rubble. She believes that both make attempts at predicting the future, one of inevitable death, decay, and dismantling.

Naylor acts as an uninvited guest into industrial, state, and privately owned spaces as a defiant act and performance. These excursions are a large part of her practice, scouting for “sites”, but more so a challenging question of how “ownership” of land is enforced in Australia.

The artist’s priority, as opposed to glamouring what industrialisation has left us of the “wild”, is to take a citizen science approach to the documentation of the Anthropocene. Her most recent works present a compilation of imagined flashbacks, fast forwards, and replays as a way to hold time within the work.

Krystyan Nowak has been working in live music, art and artist management for the past several years. In 2015, Krystyan founded the No-Fi collective and has worked with a number of local artists, musicians and venues.