Academic appointments

Dr Vittoria Di Stefano
Lecturer 

Vittoria Di Stefano’s sculptural installation practice employs a methodology of generative material experimentation to explore themes around liminality, transformation and desire, with a particular emphasis on domestic space and intimate materiality. Through the employment of a diverse material palette, and often using modernist art, design or film as points of departure, Vittoria employs a feminist critique to investigate and challenge historical power structures and notions of value. The psychological and affective impacts of the material encounter are explored through a range of experiments in a variety of display contexts, offering new ways of contemplating and experiencing material realities. 

Vittoria completed a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) (Honours) at RMIT University and then a Graduate Diploma of Education At ACU. She has exhibited extensively and recently completed a Doctor of Philosophy at RMIT University entitled Inhabiting Thresholds: encounters in liminality through material sculptural practice.

Isabella Capezio
Associate Lecturer

Isabella Capezio is a photographer, artist and Associate Lecturer at RMIT University. Isabella’s work and research circulate around themes of invisibility, queerness and landscape. Isabella’s interest in modes of publication and the production of photobooks has seen them coordinate the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive (Melbourne), co-fund and direct a small gallery, and curate educational materials for #Dysturb (Melbourne).

Isabella has facilitated and been involved in many photographic workshops locally and overseas including: Angkor Photography Festival (Cambodia); Obscura Photo Festival (Malaysia); Footscray Community Arts Centre (Melbourne) and ‘Doing Visual Politics’ (Nepal). 

Isabella is currently a PhD candidate experimenting with alternative ways to reflect on vision, and nature in post-colonial Australia.

Professional appointments

Diana Michaelidis
Student and Program Lifecycle Coordinator

Diana Michaelidis is the Student and Program Lifecycle Coordinator for the School of Art. Diana's knowledge and understanding of the Higher Education and Vocational Education sectors, stems from a 25-year career, working in various roles and by having a thorough understanding of the student lifecycle. Her experience includes coordinating and implementing a diverse array of activities, projects, and events across the student lifecycle, to facilitate the success of various academic programs while simultaneously communicating effectively with students from diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds, to encourage academic/personal achievement and advancement.  With solid technical skills and superior leadership abilities, Diana excels at working with program managers, students, and other key stakeholders, to drive excellent customer service, enrolment, and growth. Diana's expertise lies in successfully maintaining superior customer relationships and providing outstanding leadership and support to meet, and surpass, service expectations and requirements. She has led service teams in managing customer communications to realize improved customer service, satisfaction, and loyalty.

Honorary appointments

Linda Williams
Emeritus Professor

After many years teaching art history and theory, postgraduate supervision and her work as HDR Coordinator in the School of Art, in August 2022, Linda Williams was appointed as an Emeritus Professor of RMIT. In this role, she will continue to contribute to the school’s research culture, including leading the AEGIS research network for art and ecology. AEGIS has been engaged in a number of activities in 2022 and plans a series of seminars for 2023.

Professor Williams is a cultural historian with a research focus on the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities and studies in human-animal relations, particularly histories of the longue durée and their relation to current issues of climate change and mass species extinction. She has a particular research interest in philosophies of nature and how they intersect with cultural, scientific and environmental history, along with a sustained interest in 17th century studies. 

Christoph Dahlhausen
Senior Industry Fellow

Christoph Dahlhausen is an international artist and curator, based in Bonn (GER). He is working across painting, sculpture, installation and light-based artistic forms. His artistic work often is architecture related and site specific.

His practice is highly regarded in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Mexico, where he exhibits and curates extensively both in institutional and commercial spaces. Major works of his are held by the collections of the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Deutscher Bundestag Berlin, Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (AUS), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (AUS) and The Chartwell Collection, Auckland (NZ).

Dahlhausen received numerous scholarships and awards. In 2014 he was short listed for the first International Light Art Award.

Before becoming an artist he studied Violoncello and philosophy and received a full degree as a medical doctor. From 2013–2019 Christoph Dahlhausen was an Adjunct Professor, School of Art at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Lawrence English
Senior Industry Fellow

Lawrence English is an artist, composer and curator based in Australia. Working across an array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work explores the politics of perception and prompts questions of field, agency and memory. English utilises a variety of approaches including visceral live performance and site-specific installation to create work that invites audiences to consider their relationship to listening, place and embodiment. Over the past decade he has worked with sound as a medium for embodied experience and is determined to share his interests in the transformative and sensorial transgressive possibilities of sound. He is a Sidney Myer Creative fellow, was awarded an outstanding doctoral thesis award in conjunction with his PhD in 2017 and has been supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for his public artwork project in Los Angeles, Seirá. In 2022, he has been appointed the Annual Honouree by the Institute of Modern Art.

Dr Kevin Murray
Senior Industry Fellow

Dr Kevin Murray is editor of Garland Magazine. He is currently Vice-President of World Crafts Council - International. He is coordinating editor of the Online Encyclopedia of Crafts in the Asia Pacific Region and the Encyclopedia of Crafts in Latin America (due 2024). He is the international curator for the 2023 Tel Aviv Biennial of Craft and Design. In 2000–2007 he was Director of Craft Victoria where he developed the Scarf Festival and the South Project, a four-year program of exchange involving Melbourne, Wellington, Santiago and Johannesburg.  He has curated many exhibitions, including Symmetry: Crafts Meet Kindred Trades and Professions; Water Medicine: Precious Works for an Arid Continent; and Seven Sisters: Fibre Works from the West. His books include Craft Unbound: Make the Common Precious (Thames & Hudson, 2005) and with Damian Skinner, Place and Adornment: A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand (Bateman, 2014).

Dr Una Rey
Senior Industry Fellow

Dr Una Rey has fifteen years of academic teaching and research in art history and contemporary art with a professional interest in Australian cross-cultural practices. Since the mid-1990s she has worked across the national art sector with management roles in private galleries, Indigenous art centres and universities. She has developed independent curatorial projects and maintained regular art writing and public speaking work alongside an irregular painting practice. Una’s writing has been published in gallery and museum contexts, peer reviewed journals, news media and Australian and international anthologies. She is currently Editor of Artlink magazine and divides her time between regional NSW, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Photo: Alison Bennett

Dr Debbie Symons
Senior Industry Fellow

Dr Debbie Symons' practice is multi-disciplinary, and her work addresses a range of themes, including humanity's complicated relationship with the natural environment, the dynamics of the global political economy and the effects of consumer culture. With a solid research base in contemporary science and species, Symons utilises databases to investigate the links between these themes and collaborates with scientific organisations such as the IUCN Red List. Symons completed her PhD in 2014, Anthropocentrism, Endangered Species and the Environmental Dilemma and is on the Leadership Team of the AEGIS Research Network in the School of Art.

Symons' works have shown internationally and nationally, including Galerie Prodromus, Paris, The Streaming Museum and ZAZ10Ts in New York, [MARS] gallery, Linden New Art, etc. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and funding, including Australia Council, Creative Victoria, Copyright Agency, and the City of Melbourne. In 2015, she travelled to Paris as part of the Australian representation in ARTCOP21.