OUR COLLECTIVE
Celina Mack
Artistic Director
Celina is a Narrm (Melbourne) based director, stage manager and performance artist.
Celina has been performing regularly for over ten years in plays (Dracula: The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Bitten By Productions; The Bacchae, Robert Reid), musical theatre (Macbeth the Rock Opera - European tour, Gaye Meadows), film (The Night of No Return, Hannah Herrmann-Payn), dance theatre (It Sounds Silly, Chunky Move) and immersive theatrical events (Do Not Collect $200, MUST; TimeHop 2: The Clock Strikes Back, Magical Mystery Co.). Celina has completed an array of performance training including Meisner Melbourne’s Professional Performers Program (2016), Music Theatre Studio at the VCA (2015) and acting for screen training with Studio Sonder.
Celina completed a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Theatre and Performance Studies at Monash University in 2021, where she realised passions for experimental performance art, collaborative devising and directing. Celina and Savanna first met at Monash Uni, where they began trialling their techniques for the absurd through co-directing small projects and created their first endurance art and installation piece Snowplow; transforming a stretch of snow-covered mountain into a moving canvas of reappearing grass and giant snowballs, an installation which slowly disappeared for days after. Celina adores experimenting with STRANGEkit, thinking endlessly about new approaches to form, process art, participatory practices and bringing together many unconnected mediums.
Outside of their work with STRANGEkit, Celina’s other recent credits include Assistant Directing REBEL (Cassandra Fumi, 2022), Assistant Stage Managing Hercules (Daniel Schlusser Ensemble, Arts House, 2022) and Looking For Alibrandi (Stephen Nicolazzo, Malthouse Theatre, 2022), Stage Managing Buried TeaBowl - OKUNI (Yumi Umimare, 2022) and Blackrock (Platform Arts, 2022) both Directors Secondment and Assistant Stage Management on The Mermaid (La Mama Theatre, 2021) and Assistant Directing Take Me To Your Leader (Born In A Taxi, Melbourne Fringe 2020). Celina has also recently started a Substack newsletter on life and other creative musings called SOMETHING THERE.
Savanna Wegman
Artistic Director
Savanna Wegman is a director, digital designer and writer based in Narrm (Melbourne).
She is passionate about making devised and inter-disciplinary performance, exploring virtual worlds through digital technologies, writing poetry and experimental dramatic forms. Her work currently researches structures of alternative/speculative reality and digital/non-digital scenography and how they find new embodied forms through theatrical storytelling and performance spaces.
Aside from STRANGEkit, Savanna’s most recent projects include: Design secondment (set and costume) with Dann Barber on The Mermaid (La Mama 2021), Production/Audio Visual Designer for WE ARE AIR (Melbourne Fringe 2020) directed by Cassandra Fumi, Assistant Stage Management internship for THE RABBLE’s My Dearworthy Darling. She has also collaborated on productions with Monash Uni Student Theatre (Do Not Collect $200, End Transmission), Monash Shakespeare Company (R&J) and Magical Mystery Co. (TimeHop 2: The Clock Strikes Back) in roles of Assistant Director and Assistant Costume Designer. Her poetry is featured in Verge Creative Writing Journal and Flash Cove publications and has been commissioned for musical composition by the Divisi Chamber Singers.
She has just completed her Bachelor of Arts at Monash University with studies in theatre and performance, literature and digital humanities. It is through wild intensive theatre group assignments where Sav and Celina first met and collaborated, directing and designing short performance works, one of which involved a live streamed tomato soup tea party.
When not working on projects Sav finds solace in the poetic landscapes of cooking (experimental breakfasts), Bjork (incl. remixes) and long drives (aimless and existential).
Logan Trask
Creative Producer, Website developer
Logan Trask is jack of all trades manager, an educator, and a creative. She has done everything from run a performing arts program at a summer camp, to act as a production manager for MUST’s The Bacchae (La Mama Theatre, 2019). She is thrilled to get the opportunity to work with STRANGEkit and to grow her creative and managerial practices in new and exciting ways. She loves songwriting, vintage clothing, and cats.
Liam Paternott
Creative Producer, Website developer
Liam Paternott works with STRANGEkit in largely managerial roles but also engages creatively in rehearsals and in the development of the website as the project moves online. He is in his fourth year of a double degree in IT and Arts, majoring in Software Development and Literary Studies respectively. He has worked with Monash Uni Student Theatre for two years, mainly as a production manager. This year he is also one of the Interns to the Artistic Director. Recent credits include The D’oh Show (Assistant Stage Manager, 2019), Slaughterhouse Five (Assistant Producer, 2019) and Disinhibition (Production Manager, 2019).
Outside of theatre, Liam is interested in video games, game design, cooking, dance and Shakespeare. Recently he’s been keen on integrating artificial intelligence into art, both as a method and a subject.
In the second half of 2019 he went on exchange to the University of Warwick. He would love to say that he found himself in Europe but unfortunately he spent most of his time in Coventry so that didn’t quite happen.
Georgie Bright
Contributing Artist
Georgina Bright is an emerging Melbourne based Production Manager, Actor and all-round theatre maker who has graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Arts and is currently doing her Master of Arts and Cultural Management at Melbourne University.
She is obsessed with art and all the weird and wonderful things that people pull out of their brains! She (for some reason) has this inherent need to know every nitty gritty detail of everything and STRANGEkit is the perfect way to try a little bit of it all with its experimental forms and its leaps into different and crazy spaces!!
Her most recent credits include various forms of management for Archimedes War (Darebin, 2021), Thank You for Calling (Melbourne Fringe, 2021) and The Love of the Nightingale (Theatreworks, 2021). She has worked as the Keynote Intern for Melbourne Fringe in 2020 and has worked as a collaborating artist for We Are AIR (Melbourne Fringe/CTP, 2020), HOLESP@CE (Melbourne Fringe/STRANGEkit, 2020), Systems People (Born in a Taxi, CTP, 2020), My Brilliant Career (CTP, 2019), The Bacchae (La Mama, MUST, 2019) and Slaughterhouse Five (Theatreworks, MUST, 2019).
Tallulah McKenzie
Contributing Artist
Tallulah is a multidisciplinary artist who can be found uni-hopping from creative project to creative project. A theatre-maker with experience in event production, Tallulah is currently studying filmmaking at SAE Institute Melbourne. Tomorrow? Who knows. Can be bribed with milo.
Tallulah was a director and co-producer in Green Room nominated Let’s Take Over 2020. She has been a contributing artist and performer in Samara Hersch’s Body of Knowledge: At Home since 2020. Tallulah directed and created the short film Beside Herself for Emerging Mind’s Looking Back Project in collaboration with the Satellite Foundation.
Michelle Nguyen
Contributing Artist, Sound Designer and Composer
Michelle is a Naarm/Melbourne based composer and sound artist working with electronic music, sound design, and interactive media. They are inspired by art that is surreal, experimental, creates shared spaces, and explores experience.
Michelle’s recent creative ventures include a debut EP on Addictech Records (2020), sounds for Signal Arts: Screen X Sound (2020), Big Bao: Medium Spicy 2 (2021), New Weird Australia: Space Between Space (2021), and Vector Fields Vol.3 (2021), plus a live set at Earth Frequency Festival (2021), and event organising and production for Forest Grooves (2021). They have also been creating interactive A/V installations as part of Wholegrain Ears since 2017, and are currently composing for Rabbit Punch (WA) alongside studying audio engineering at Collarts.
Casuarina O’Brien
Contributing Artist
Casuarina is a Naarm/Melbourne based theatremaker interested in collaborative and multidisciplinary methods of devising new work, with a background in directing, dramaturgy, performing and producing. She previously studied at UNSW where she directed four shows including most recently a revival of Australian play ‘This Old Man Comes Rolling Home’, and a colourful Grotowski-inspired version of ‘The Tempest’. She is now completing her Bachelor of Arts at Monash University. In 2019 she performed in Barking Spider Visual Theatre’s production of ‘Forgiveness’, which toured to the Wuzhen International Theatre Festival in China. She also has experience in arts management including as president of the NSW University Theatrical Society (NUTS).
Casuarina is inspired by art that is transformative and disruptive, and is increasingly drawn to theatre that creates shared spaces and community. Working alongside Celina and Savanna on intensively creating short theatre pieces was one of the highlights of her Monash theatre studies, and she’s thrilled to be part of the STRANGEkit Collective. In her spare time you’ll see her scouring op shops for the perfect hideous vintage blouse, murmuring love poems to her percolator and trying to win over her housemate’s eternally aloof cat.
Callum Robertson
Contributing Artist
Hey, I was thinking of doing art maybe at around 8 tonight, do you think you’ll have time?
One day I’ll go back to Monash, but for now I’m a part of this collective STRANGEkit, it’s fun.
I enjoy many things, including being involved in STRANGEkit. I also enjoy being allowed outside. Unfortunately, I am not allowed outside at the moment ☹.
This is my first deep dive into the world of performance art, and it feels like diving into a bountiful coral reef, glub glub. This collective is a pleasure to be a part of and to work with. I hope you enjoy being a part of this experience as well, as there is no art without an audience… or is there?
Questions like that as well as many more might be answered, for example, should I join a cycling class? I don’t know let me know what you think.
Kind regards and I’ll see you at 8! Don’t be late!
Chloe Selsick
Contributing Artist, Graphic Designer
Chloe Selsick is a multidisciplinary artist and theatre-maker who is currently in her third year at Monash studying Arts and Visual art. She has acted with MUST in the past in ‘Do Not Collect $200’ (2019) and despite being relatively new to the Monash theatre scene has already become strongly invested in the community and plans to further develop her theatre skills moving onward.
She looks forward to exploring the daunting world of performance art (which has previously been a topic only discussed in fine art lectures) with the STRANGEkit collective and expand her artistic practice.