Women in Design 2024

Megan Patty is Head of Publications, Photographic Services and Library at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, and is founding Curator of the Melbourne Art Book Fair (est.2015). Her doctoral work examined the role of social publishing practices in contemporary museums.

Megan's Instagram

Editor, writer, advocate
Parlour, independent consultant

Justine Clark is an architectural editor, writer, researcher, advisor and advocate. She is a co-founder and director of Parlour: gender, equity, architecture. She leads the organisation’s event, advocacy and funding programs, and established the Parlour website, which she now edits with Susie Ashworth. Justine consults to built environment organisations, institutions and practices on policy, strategy publications, events and public engagement.

Justine is active in public discussions of architecture; she has convened many events, curated exhibitions and sat on national and international juries. From 2000–2011 Justine worked on Architecture Australia, and was editor of the journal for seven years. Her work has won awards for architecture in the media and her broader contribution to the profession was recognised with the 2015 Marion Mahony Prize and the 2019 President's Prize from the Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Chapter.

Her writing appears in both the scholarly and professional press, and she has worked on topics including gender and architecture, architectural criticism, architectural drawing and postwar modernism. She is co-author, with Dr Paul Walker, of the book Looking for the Local: Architecture and the New Zealand Modern (2000). Justine is an honorary Principal Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Justine's Instagram

Vanessa Ward is the Course Coordinator for the Bachelor of Design program. She comes from a multidisciplinary design background and is now focused on systems-led regenerative design.

Before joining The University of Tasmania, Vanessa had a global design career that straddled industry and academia. Besides running her own brand consultancy Nomadism, she held senior design and strategy positions in leading agencies Fuse Project (San Francisco), Bruce Mau Design (Toronto) and multinational Procter and Gamble (Singapore).

Her work and experience span the spectrum of strategic, brand, digital, communication, product and spatial design. Vanessa has previously taught the Masters and Bachelor level design courses at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore.

What drives her teaching and research is her deep conviction in design’s transformational capacity to impact positive systemic change

Nomadism Website

Simone Bliss an award-winning landscape architect and creative director of SBLA Studio, with offices in Launceston and Melbourne. Her innovation, playfulness and creativity is highly valued within both the design and environmental industries.

Simone has twenty years of experience working on projects from designing grasslands and bee corridors on rooftops to regenerating post-agricultural landscapes. She aims to connect humans to landscape in hope of inspiring a respect of country through caring for the land and waterways on which we all inhabit and gains much joy from collaborating and learning from traditional owners and is a strong advocate for equality through design.

Simone's website

Simone's Instagram

Marlo Lyda is an Australian-born designer-maker and curator based in the Powerhouse Creative Residencies on Gadigal Country, Sydney. Coaxing delicate yet functional objects from rarely considered resources, Lyda’s work provokes a reassessment of the intrinsic value embedded in overlooked ‘waste’ materials. Lyda's deep-rooted commitment to celebrating the inherent beauty of makers and materials extends beyond her own creations to the exhibitions she curates, embodying a harmonious blend of creativity, resourcefulness, and community purpose.

Graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2021, Lyda integrates design thinking with a hands-on approach to creation and collaboration, drawing from her education in the Netherlands. Her work, ranging from furniture and lighting to material research, has been exhibited at Dutch Design Week and throughout Australia. Her newer foray into curation continues to garner recognition since establishing MATTERS in 2023, a three-part exhibition series and design platform that emphasizes the importance of intention in the design process. The second instalment was met with high acclaim as a notable highlight of Melbourne Design Week’s 2024 satellite program.

In 2023, Marlo was awarded the NSW Design (Early Career) Fellowship - Powerhouse Residency, in partnership with Create NSW. With this support, she completed her newest body of work, ‘Turning (Camphor)’, displayed at the MATTERS Exhibition during Melbourne Design Week 2024. Her most notable collection, ‘Remnants’, which received the Judges Choice Award in the VIVID Emerging Design Competition in 2022, is now joined by a collection of onyx wall lights called ‘Fragments’, which has been shortlisted for the 2024 IDEA Awards.

Marlo's website

Marlo's Instagram

Harriet Edquist is Professor Emerita, School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT, Founding Director of the RMIT Design Archives and founder of RMIT Design Archive. Active in the architectural and design community for many years, in 2020 Harriet was appointed a Member Order of Australia (AM) and awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award, Victorian Museums and Galleries Awards. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

In 2015 she was appointed inaugural President of Automotive Historians Australia Inc. An author and curator, Harriet's research includes Australian art, design and architectural history situated within a global setting. She has curated and collaborated on numerous exhibitions with associated books. These include (with Helen Stuckey): Radical Utopia: an archaeology of a creative city (RMIT Gallery 2023); Dream Factory, GMH Design at Fishermans Bend 1964-2020 (City Gallery 2021); (with Jane Eckett): Melbourne Modern. European art and design at RMIT since 1945 (RMIT Gallery 2019); Shifting gear. Design Innovation and the Australian car (NGV 2015); Free, Secular and Democratic: building the Public Library 1853-1913 (SLV 2013) and, Michael O'Connell. The Lost Modernist (Bendigo Art Gallery 2011).

Other books include George Baldessin. Paradox and Persuasion (2009; second edition 2022)); Pioneers of Modernism: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia (2008) and Harold Desbeowe-Annear. A Life in Architecture (2004). She was co-author of Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond. Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture (2019). Harriet is presently researching Tasmanian women artists and makers.