Asia:NZ hosts leading Australian arts sector expert
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Last week (1 to 5 February) our arts and community programme hosted Alison Carroll, Director of the Arts Program at Asialink at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Alison carried out an internal measures project evaluating our culture grants and the artist-in-residence programmes.
She was based for the week in both Wellington and Auckland, meeting with previous and potential culture grant recipients as well as representatives from key organisations within New Zealand’s arts sector.
Alison has been an academic, critic, writer, curator and administrator of art exhibitions and artist exchanges with Asia for over 20 years. She has two First Class degrees in Art History from the University of Melbourne, and has taught there at various times since graduation. She has written widely on European, Asian and Australian art.
Alison was Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Art Gallery of South Australia for ten years and during that time curated the major exhibition East and West; the Meeting of Asian and European Art. She has curated over 40 exhibitions, including Out of Asia, the first exhibition to include Australian artists’ attitudes to Asia and the first major inclusion of contemporary Asian art at an Adelaide Festival. She was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for the Queensland Art Gallery’s first (and following two) Asia Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Asian Art in 1991.
She has served on the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, Arts Victoria’s Arts Development and International Advisory Committees, the Advisory Committees for Arts Management at the University of Melbourne and the University of South Australia, the Board of the Art Museums Association of Australia, the City of Melbourne’s Arts Advisory Board, the Australia-Indonesia Institute and the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board.
Alison established and is Director of the Arts Program at Asialink, University of Melbourne, the main program for arts exchange between Asia and Australia for visual arts, performing arts, literature and arts management practice. She received the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council’s Emeritus Medal 2006 for her work at Asialink.
Read more:
View the Asialink homepage and a recent essay by Alison on why Arts are a microcosm of Australia-Asia engagement
Photo: Asia:NZ Culture director Jennifer King with Alison Carroll
