Jacina Leong will step in while Jamie Lewis undertakes ‘the longest artistic residency she has ever embarked on’ – motherhood.
After three critical years at Next Wave, our CEO – artist and dramaturg – Jamie Lewis will be taking parental leave.
“While I am undertaking what I consider the longest artist residency I have ever embarked -on, Next Wave will be in good hands,” Jamie said.
“I am super stoked to welcome and introduce Jacina Leong to the team as interim CEO!”
Jacina Leong 梁玉明 is an artist-curator, educator and researcher of Chinese Italian heritage, living and practising on the unceded Country of the Wurundjeri people in Narrm/Melbourn and engaged in critical processes of community engagement, arts management and post-representational curatorial practice.
She is a former Co-Director of Bus Projects, Public Programs Curator at The Cube and Ipswich Art Gallery, Producer for the Creative Industries Precinct, Sessional Academic at RMIT University School of Art and La Trobe University, and mentor for the ACMI CEO digital mentoring program.
Jacina is currently a committee member of the Darebin Council Art and Heritage Advisory Panel and recently completed her PhD, which explores the ‘tensions of care at play in post-representational curatorial practice, and the real-world implications and challenges of practising care within colonial capitalist organisational systems and structures’. The major creative output of her PhD was caring in and through our practices, an online resource developed to cultivate shared practitioner reflexivity, and to consider not only the complexities of care, but also the purposes, values, and ethics of our practices.
“I am excited to see the influence of her stewardship of the organisation, its values, and frameworks; to witness the evolution of the strategy and model – and, through that, the impact it will have on the artists we work with, and the sector at large,” Jamie continued.
Having worked in the arts sector for fifteen years, Jacina is committed to the role that arts organisations can play in bringing people together to explore and respond to complex and converging crises.
“Next Wave, and its commitment to Justice, Friendship and Care, is an organisation close to my heart,” Jacina said.
“For close to four decades, Next Wave has supported artists to shape and enact radically situated, and globally implicated, shared futures—amid climates of political, social and ecological uncertainty, to provide artists with space and time, as Next Wave does, to dream, to organise, to activate, and to agitate, has never been more relevant or needed.
“It is with humility to listen and openness to learn—with and from our extended community—that I take up the role of Acting CEO/Director of Next Wave, to lead the organisation into its 40th year, and to steward our core values."
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