ABOUT JEN RAE

Dr Jen Rae is an award-winning artist and researcher of Canadian Scottish-Métis (Indigenous) descent living on unceded Djaara Country (Castlemaine) Australia. She is recognised for her practice and expertise situated at the intersections of art, speculative futures and climate emergency disaster adaptation + resilience – predominantly articulated through transdisciplinary collaborations, multi-platform projects, community alliances and public pedagogies. She is the Co-founder and Creative Research Lead at the Centre for Reworlding, Co-founder (with American artist Dawn Weleski of Conflict Kitchen) and Director of Fair Share Fare, a member of the National Task Force for Creative Recovery, awarded the prestigious 2023 Creative Australia Fellowship for Emerging and Experimental Art, the 2024 Australian National University’s H.C. Coombs Creative Fellowship and the 2024/2025 International Visiting Artist Residency at the University of Wisconsin.

Jen creates and contributes to experimental multi-platform collaborative projects balanced with professional mentoring of other artists, public talks, workshops and deep socially-engaged projects with diverse partners and communities. Most relevant is her role as a core artist of Arts House’s prescient REFUGE project (2016-2022) - where artists, emergency service providers and communities worked together to rehearse climate-related emergencies exploring the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness. Relevant projects during REFUGE include the speculative fiction short film REFUGIUM (co-written with Claire G. Coleman); PORTAGE: SHELTER2CAMP in collaboration with 4 First Nations master weavers to co-build 6 life-size disaster shelters with over 120 community participants and partners; the FIRST ASSEMBLY OF THE CENTRE FOR REWORLDING event; and, the art exhibition RESURGENCE. All are grounded in First Nations knowledge systems and protocols, exploring themes climate, colonisation, disaster preparedness and intergenerational justice.

In 2018/19, Jen co-designed the Creative Resilience Lab (CRL) framework with Maree Grenfell in partnership with the City of Vancouver. CRL is an adaptive, interactive and relational methodology that enables the collaborative capacity of artists + cultural producers, community members + service providers, and those engaged in climate emergency fields and disaster management ecosystems. The CRL is not about reinventing the wheel. The CRL approach brings an intersectional way of engaging with the climate emergency and disaster risk reduction + resilience by holding complexity in one hand and relational accountability in the other. Projects get realised and/or amplified, duplication of effort is mininimsed, knowledge and resource sharing across sectors and between diverse cohorts of people become easier, and relationships become deeper and sustainable. Since 2019, the Centre for Reworlding has co-created and delivered CRL’s in partnership with the Museum of Discovery, Clarendon Creative, the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience and City of Darebin.

Jen is a highly sought-after speaker and workshop presenter, speaking on the role of culture and the arts in climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction and resilience; speculative practice and Indigenous pedagogies in the climate emergency; and, future food systems. In 2022, Jen was an invited keynote speaker on the role of arts + culture in climate emergency disaster risk reduction and resilience at the NATIONAL SUMMIT 2022: From Risk to Resilience- Australia’s Call to Action. She also co-designed + co-facilitated (with Kate Sulan, Christine Drummond and Jonathan Craig) the City of Melbourne’s emergency exercise drill ‘Exercise Torrent’ with emergency service providers and local communities in North Melbourne; and, co-curated the exhibition Centre for Reworlding presents RESURGENCE at Incinerator Art Gallery with Claire G. Coleman. In 2023, Jen gave keynote talks at Emily Carr University, SCALE/LeSAUT (online), University of Alberta, University of Wisconsin and McMaster University.

Jen was a board member of the Creative Recovery Network (2017-2023) and the International Environmental Communication Association (2019-2023). She has lectured at the post-graduate level in socially-engaged art and performance at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University.

(*Métis are one of the three recognised Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Pronounced may-tee)

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