10 October 2024
The Creative Investment Fellowships 2024 offer a unique, self-directed funding opportunity for emerging creatives to bring their vision to life. This fellowship empowers recipients to execute projects with lasting impact while supporting their professional growth and development.
Supported by the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation and valued up to $7,500. In 2024, four emerging creatives from a range of creative disciplines, including visual and performance art, theatre, screen and music.
Congratulations to the following Helpmann Academy Creative Investment Fellowship 2024 recipients!
Danielle Lim (Flinders University) Danielle is a Malaysian-Australian actor, theatre maker, and producer who graduated from Flinders Drama Centre in 2021. She has been involved with various arts companies, including ActNow Theatre, State Theatre Company South Australia, Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, Windmill Theatre, RUMPUS Theatre, South Australian Playwrights Theatre, Australian Plays Transform, DreamBIG Festival and OzAsia Festival.
Danielle premiered her first multi-disciplinary theatre project, Caught In Between, at the 2024 Adelaide Fringe Festival, winning a Weekly Fringe Award for her performance. She is passionate about championing Asian-Australian stories on stage and screen, hoping to inspire more Asian-Australians to pursue an arts career. Following the success of Caught In Between, Danielle will leverage the fellowship to take her solo show on tour to Melbourne and Sydney and undertake a producing mentorship with theatre producer Caitlin Ellen Moore.
“By having the support of the Helpmann Academy Creative Investment Fellowship, I can achieve a dream of mine which I didn’t think was possible in these emerging stages of my career, and that is to tour my own show. I am excited to further my artistic practice through this experience and to connect with industry contacts interstate, building my networks as an independent artist.”
Danielle Lim
2024 Recipient
Eric Kuhlmann (University of South Australia) is a queer artist living and working on Kaurna Yerta, Adelaide. He makes drawings, paintings, prints, videos, computer programs, performances, and interactive installations. He has exhibited at ARIs and council galleries around Adelaide, Sydney, and Canberra. He has written and toured cabaret shows around Australia and internationally to Stockholm and London.
Eric is interested in how creative coding can be combined with performance to create compelling experiences for audiences that draw on historical events and people from LGBTIQA+ communities and seeks to collaborate with a range of other artists from theatre and visual arts backgrounds. Through the fellowship, Eric will develop and present his project Museum of Hope for the 2025 Feast Festival to commemorate 50 years of decriminalisation of homosexuality in South Australia.
“Museum of Hope will allow me to combine my disparate practices for the first time, combining visual art, creative coding of interactive systems, and performance. It will allow me to collaborate with a team of other artists from the inception of the work, a luxury I have not had before. I look forward to bringing stories from queer communities to the stage in what I hope will be a moving experience for audiences and an innovative piece of theatre where the digital looks handmade.”
Eric Kuhlmann
2024 Recipient
Gemma Salomon (Flinders University) is the founder of Whisper Tree Productions, a femme-focussed genre film house based in South Australia. In 2023, she was the recipient of the Helpmann Academy Creative Innovator Program major prize of $20,000 in seed funding. She is a South Australian Screen Award winner and co-directed the 2022 Ramsay Prize-winning video performance work, Witness, by Adelaide-based performance artist Ida Sophia. Her horror short, The Eaters, will have its world premiere at SXSW Sydney in 2024. The fellowship will enable Gemma to take private sessions with acting and directing coach Miranda Harcourt, gain industry insights, and produce her next short film “Minimise” in 2025 in Adelaide.
“This Fellowship allows me the unique opportunity to engage with some of Australia’s most experienced actors, applying their insights in real time to directing my next horror short film – also made possible through this grant. This approach will create the environment for more powerful collaboration with my actors, evidenced on screen through their engaging and honest performances. I’m thrilled to be expanding and deepening my approach to directing actors, and this would not be possible without the Helpmann Academy’s support.”
Gemma Salomon
2024 Recipient
Grace Mensforth (University of Adelaide) is a vocalist, songwriter, and storyteller based on Kaurna land. A graduate of the Elder Conservatorium of Music, she is the co-founder of Independent Record Label and Creative Agency ‘Home Body Records’, and creates original music under the artist name ‘Grace Vandals’ and her band ‘Tell Mama’. Unabashedly emotional, eclectic and full of the mortal notions of risk, love and loss – Grace Vandals delivers you into a rich and gritty world of sound, coated in an unexpected outer layer of tenderness. Her upcoming release invites you into a melting pot of alternative rock and folky influences, full of prickly emotions, revelations, ugly truths, and childlike curiosity.
Vandals and her band share an open desire for unravelling perfection and embracing the unusual. Liberation to dive deep, explore sounds, make mistakes, and enjoy the process is what drives her. She will leverage the fellowship to collaborate with industry professionals to create and execute an impactful brand and release campaign for the Grace Vandals debut EP.
“The Helpmann Academy’s support of this project will significantly expand the realm of possibilities to build and invest in my music career, refine my practice, and achieve significant professional milestones.”
Grace Mensforth
2024 Recipient
The Creative Investment Fellowships are made possible through the generosity of the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation, with support from Nicholas Linke.
Images: (1) Danielle Lim in Coldhands, 2022. Photo by Jamie Hornsby. (2) Eric Kuhlmann, Hubcaps, 2022. Photo by David Hume. (3) The Eaters dir. Gemma Salomon BTS. Photo by Thomas McCammon. (4) Grace Vandals. Photo by Ashleigh Noordhoek.