Project Leader
Anna Hickey-Moody
Anna Hickey-Moody is Professor of Media and Communication, ARC Future Fellow and RMIT Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University. Anna has worked in social research with young people and communities for over 20 years and she often includes arts practice as a way of sharing stories and exploring experiences. Anna has written 5 books and edited 5 very widely cited collections.
Project Team
Robina Akhter Uller
Artistic associate
Robina is interested in memories and how we create them, what we choose to keep and what we choose to discard. Robina’s work is centred on the notion of fractured memories. It is inspired by the hours spent listening to her mother and father talk about their movement from India to Pakistan to the motherland Britain, and her experiences growing up as a minority where her religion, culture and heritage was regarded as a curious fascination.
Shabana Baig
Artistic associate
Shabana was always the black sheep of the family. Though she didn’t know it at the time, doing her degree in textile design enabled her to express herself through her art and become more independent. Her artwork is an interpretation of the culture around her and her struggle as a second generation Asian in Britain during the 80s and 90s.
Mia Harrison
Research associate | sydney project manager
Mia Harrison is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Her research explores how the zombie can be used as a tool of critical thinking in body culture studies. Mia has a background in tech, critical disability studies, and media production, and works as a Research Associate on the Interfaith Childhoods project. She is also the cohost and producer of the academic pop culture podcasts Trope Watchers and A Clash of Critics.
Kate Lonie
Research associate | london & manchester project manager
Kate Lonie is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Drawing on the fields of gender studies, media studies, youth studies and celebrity studies, her thesis demonstrates how contemporary celebrity mediates, and complicates, understandings of political and media engagement, as well as feminism, among young women. Kate is based in London and works as a Research Associate on the Interfaith Childhoods project
Marissa Willcox
Research associate | Melbourne Project Manager
Marissa is a digital ethnographer currently undertaking PhD research in the school of Media and Communications at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Marissa is currently writing an autoethnographic narrative around the ways feminist and queer artists on Instagram use art practice to build online activist communities. She uses New Materialist theory to think through the ways digital art can be considered a catalyst for change. Marissa works as a Research Associate on the Interfaith Childhoods project focussing largely on the Melbourne and Canberra Research sites.
Lucian Marine
Research associate
Lucian Marine is an artist and Art Therapist who loves anything accessible, experiential and biodegradable. They facilitate creative arts groups in community and mental health settings, aiming for inclusivity and cross-cultural awareness. Lucian is based in Melbourne and works as a Research Associate on the Interfaith Childhoods projects.
Zoe Walshe
RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Zoe Walshe is studying for an MA in Social Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is interested in creative and participatory methodologies, and her research explores issues around housing, home and belonging in the city. She has a professional background working with children and young people in community arts and theatre. Zoe is based in London, and working as a Research Assistant on the Interfaith Childhoods Project.
Angelica Harris-Faull
Research Assistant
Angelica Harris-Faull is a PhD candidate at the University of South Australia, in the School of Art, Architecture and Design. Her practice-led research explores the womb as a socially and politically contested site, with specific focus on printed representations of female reproductive organs in the seventeenth-century and contemporary young women’s articulations of their reproductive bodies through interviews. Angelica is a printmaking-based artist, with prior professional experience working with diverse community groups on art-based workshops in South Australia. Angelica is based in Adelaide and is a Research Assistant on the Interfaith Childhoods Project.
Anne-Marie Atkinson
REsearch Assistant
Anne-Marie Atkinson is an artist based in Leeds, UK. She has collaborated 1-1 with a learning disabled artist for over 3 years, achieving considerable regional success including a £15,000 commission from Leeds2023. Anne-Marie has recently begun a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University with a VC Scholarship, where she is exploring how learning disabled artists are informing contemporary arts. She is also a GTA and casual Associate Lecturer on BA (Hons) Interactive Arts.
Thu Le
Research Assistant
Thu is an illustrator/visual artist from Hanoi, Vietnam, now operating in Manchester, UK. She has great interest in children's experience, emotions, & imagination and how they are shaped in the context of contemporary culture. Apart from freelancing in illustration, her current research focus is on toys and narratives of playthings.
Beverley Irving
Research Assistant
Beverley is an artist who has recently completed an MA in Illustration at Manchester School of Art. While researching gender stereotyping and it's effects on children, she explores the relationship between ceramics and illustrative idioms and her interest in society and experience is evident in her practice. As figurative naive forms become mixed with themes such as sexism and tattoo culture through clay and deft line drawing, the viewer is left with a sense of introspection. Through social engagement art, she connects with the community through making together and creating safe spaces and conversations while promoting mental health and wellbeing.
Dr Christine Horn
Research Associate
Christine has worked with the Interfaith Childhoods team since 2019. Before joining the project Christine worked in the field of social research, art, design and digital media for several years. She has taught digital and analog art and design including photography, print, typography and illustration. Her previous research aimed to establish the impact and specific use of digital technologies among Indigenous communities in Sarawak, Malaysia. Christine was awarded her PhD from Swinburne University in 2015.
Previous Team
Roaa Ali
Roaa Ali completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham and her thesis explored the identity politics and cultural production of ethnic minorities in post 9/11 America. It will be published as a monograph through Palgrave Macmillan. She is currently researching Interculturalism and the role of minority art in reshaping its discourse, and worked as a Research Affiliate on the Interfaith Childhoods project.
Kate Johnston
Kate Johnston is an interdisciplinary researcher in cultural studies and environmental humanities. Her PhD research focuses on the cultural aspects of sustainability and tuna based on multi-site ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, Japan and Australia. Kate worked as a Research Assistant on the first pilot of the Interfaith Childhoods project, and now works as a Research Associate at Sustainable Fish Lab.
Tia Roko
Tia Roko is the former CEO of Auburn Diversity Services and a student of post-graduate Cultural Studies at Sydney University. Tia has worked in the community sector for twenty years in particular with migrant and refugee communities. She is the former Chairperson of the NSW Council for Pacific Communities and currently has an advisory role with both Police and Justice multicultural advisory committees.
Tilly Johnson
Tilly Johnson is a mixed media artist, currently studying for her BA in Three Dimensional Design at Manchester School of Art with an Erasmus year at ArtEZ, Netherlands. Her practice currently focuses on material play, and she is progressing to encourage bodies of work exploring, highlighting and celebrating emotion through form and material. Through a technological age, there is a fear of separation which she aims to combat through celebration.
Lutfiye Ali
Lutfiye (PhD, BA (Hons.) VicMelb) is a Research Fellow at RMIT. Her areas of research interest include social identity, community making and belonging among racialised and ethnicised identities. These sit within the context of Australian multicultural social relations, informed by current and historical global relations of power. A major focus of her research explores the complexity and the diverse ways in which identity among Muslim women, migrant and second generation Australians are negotiated at the intersections of gender, culture, religion and race. This research draws on Third World and postmodern feminist theories. Lutfiye worked as a Research Fellow on the Interfaith Childhoods project.
Katerina Eleftheriadou
Katerina is an artist from Greece who has recently concluded her MFA in Fine Art in Manchester School of Art. Within her practice she is interested in exploiting the metaphorical potential of the materials and employing a diverse range of social and cultural references. She has organized workshops for the Centre of Chinese Contemporary Art, she has worked as an assistant curator for Marianna Tsionki (Research curator for CFCCA- Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University) and she delivered educational programmes for the Children’s Art Museum in Athens, Greece.
Crystal Nicholson
Research Assistant
Crystal Nicholson has just completed an Msc in Social Research at Goldsmiths University of London. With a previous degree in Sociology and Anthropology, Crystal’s research interest is urban displacement and gentrification. Her thesis was an investigation into the role of art, both exploring whether it is part of the problem or part of the solution in driving the gentrification of Brixton. Crystal is based in London and is working as a research assistant on the Interfaith Childhoods project.