Drama Queens

Ralph Myers is Artistic Director of Belvoir Street Theatre and one of Australia’s foremost set designers. He has designed for most of the country’s major theatre companies, including extensively for Belvoir and Sydney Theatre Company as well as Melbourne Theatre Company, Bell Shakespeare, Griffin Theatre Company and Legs on The Wall.

Ralph has also worked in dance, circus, film and opera with credits including Two Faced Bastard (Chunky Move), Cosi Fan Tutte and Peter Grimes (Opera Australia).

Ralph has collaborated with many of Australia’s prominent directors including Neil Armfield, Benedict Andrews, Barrie Kosky, Wesley Enoch, Lucy Guerin, Robin Nevin, Gideon Obarzanek and Cate Blanchett. In 2005 and 2006 Ralph was Resident Designer at the Sydney Theatre Company.

Ralph has programmed Belvoir’s 2011 season and will design The Wild Duck, The Seagull and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

Patricia Cornelius is a founding member of Melbourne Workers Theatre. She’s a playwright, novelist and film writer. She’s the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and the 2019 Green Room award for Life Achievement ...

Chris is literary director of the Melbourne Theatre Company.

His previous positions have included: inaugural artistic director, PlayWriting Australia; literary manager, and Wharf 2LOUD Producer, Sydney Theatre Company; and literary manager, Company B Belvoir St Theatre.

He has also been curator of the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference; and festival director of the International Festival for Young Playwrights.

Recent directing credits include Richard Frankliand's Walking into the Bigness (co-director with Wayne Blair, Malthouse Theatre 2014), which won Best Performance for VCE Theatre Studies and was nominated for three Green Room Awards, Ian Wilding’s Rare Earth (NIDA 2011) and Quack (Griffin 2010), and Damien Millar’s The Modern International Dead (Griffin 2008), which won Best New Play at the Sydney Theatre Critics’ Awards and the WA Premier’s Literary Award, as well as being shortlisted for the NSW, Queensland and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

Chris has a PhD from Sydney University, was awarded an inaugural Dramaturgy Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts in 2004. He was selected to attend New Visions New Voices at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center in 2008.

His monograph on institutional racism and outreach strategies was published by Currency House in June, 2008. He has recently written introductions to Currency Press volumes by Lachlan Philpott and Lally Katz. In 2009 Chris was named as one of Sydney’s 100 creative catalysts; he sat on the steering committee for the 2011 Australian Theatre Forum, and on the board of Arena Theatre Company (2008-13) and the artistic directorate of Hothouse Theatre (2011-14). He is currently on the Board of Theatre Network Victoria.

Van Badham is a Melbourne-based writer, theatremaker, critic, activist, occasional broadcaster and one of Australia’s most controversial public intellectuals. She is currently employed as a political columnist and culture critic for Guardian Australia, while as a theatremaker she’s had more than 100 international productions of her work.

In 2014, her theatre projects include Notoriously Yours - a live-action spy movie about the surveillance - at the Adelaide Fringe, The Trollhunter - a Melbourne Comedy Festival show with Catherine Deveny, and Big Baby: Boss of the World - a collaboration with Terrapin, the national puppet company.

In 2014, she’s won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for her play Muff, the Adelaide Critics' Circle Award for Notoriously Yours and shared the Green Room award for Best Production with her adaptation of The Bloody Chamber.

Internationally, her works for stage and musical theatre have appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, Adelaide Festival, New York Summer Play Festival, in Australia for Malthouse Theatre and Griffin Theatre, in London at the Royal Court Theatre, the Bush (for Paines Plough), the Finborough and Theatre503, and toured extensively in the UK, across her native Australia and to the US, Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Slovenia.

The BBC World Service, Radio 4 and Radio 3 have produced her radio dramas. Her first novel, Burnt Snow, released in Australia in 2010, is the first in a three-book series for Pan Macmillan. She trained in writing for television on attachment to BBC serial Holby City and her award-winning short film, Octopus, screened in the Dungog, Tropfest Australia, Munich International, Berlin International and LA Shorts festivals.