Bio

Artistic Director Jen Lyons-Reid and Executive Producer Carl Kuddell are Change Media's co-founders, joint CEOs and lead artists. In the last two decades they have worked across media, socially engaged and experimental art, producing multi-million-dollar projects in collaboration with hundreds of diverse communities across Australia, to create TV series, art exhibitions, new CACD models, human rights documentaries and hundreds of community-led short films.

Jen and Carl live and work on Ngarrindjeri country on the South Australian Fleurieu Peninsula and run Change Media, a nationally acclaimed, multi-award-winning community arts and cultural development (CACD) initiative. They have collaborated with local and professional artists, to deliver over 500 co-creative workshops with over 10,000 community participants across Australia.

They have worked with remote, regional and urban communities, including partnerships with Ngarrindjeri, Bell Shakespeare Co, the Australian Festival for Young People, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, PVI Collective, Apple, in youth prisons, with the Australian Refugee Association, with people living with disability through Arts Access Victoria and SA Health, through funding partnership with many federal, state and regional governments, non-art NGO’s and arts organizations.

Jen and Carl like playing with complexity. They draw on anarcha-feminism, true-cost ecology and anti-colonialism, with a generous dollop of absurdist existentialism and DIY propaganda art. Their practice spans video art, documentary, cartooning, poetry, sculpture, interactive installations, performance and community art and cultural development. Their creative experiments explore how privileged normality masks systematic brutality. Their work is grounded in critical and intersectional theory and social justice.

They interrogate their CACD practice and sector developments to create national critical literacy concepts about power and privilege. They create new methodologies to confront the impact of ongoing colonial ignorance and well-intended supremacy mindsets.

In 2013 they partnered on an ARC Linkage Grant ‘Investigation into Harm in CACD’ with the University of Melbourne. In 2015 Jen was awarded the prestigious two-year Australia Council for the Arts CACD Fellowship, ‘Interrogations of power and privilege in socially engaged practice’, which led to the development of 'Creating Together' in 2017 and 'What Privilege?' in 2018-19, and ‘_this breath is not mine to keep’ in 2020-21, with a series of collaborative art exhibitions across SA.

Jen and Carl wrote, produced and directed several hours of TV, with four factual entertainment series for SBS and ABC [Is Your House Killing You?, The Pinnaroo Surfer, Ngarrindjeri Shorts and Deadly Family Portraits], several internationally acclaimed human rights documentaries [Holiday Camp (50min, 2002), First Fleet Back (26min, 2005) 10x14 Bricks - Stories from Youth in Lock-up (60min, 2009), Nukkan.Kungun.Yunnan - Ngarrindjeri's Being Heard (22min, 2009), Moogy’s Yuki (26min, 2010), A Life Well Lived (30min, 2012), The Loop, (19min, 2019)] and hundreds of short films in collaboration with communities, support services and local governments. Many of their community-led projects have resulted in TV broadcasts and global recognition.

Their work has been exhibited widely and screened internationally, including global sales to UKTV, Sundance Channel USA, TVNZ, SBS, ABC, iView, NITV, Studio4Networks, DishTV and Magic Lantern India, and global film festivals and art events, including the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, International Melbourne WebFest, Seoul Human Rights Film Festival, Regional Arts Australia Kumuwuki, Transmediale Berlin, International Human Rights Watch Film Festival New York and London, MyHero Film Festival USA, Light in Winter Melbourne, Adelaide Fringe, Oxford Film Festival, Athens Film Festival, Melbourne Underground Film Festival, Adelaide Film Festival, St. Kilda Film Festival and TarraWarra Biennale. Their media work is being distributed globally.