The Show of the Year 2018

Casey Bennetto is an award-winning writer, musician and radio broadcaster. He wrote the musical KEATING!, hosts the program Superfluity on Melbourne’s 3RRR, and has appeared in places as diverse as ABCTV’s Spicks and Specks, the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House.

Born in 1969, Bennetto spent his formative years amongst the fragrant meadows and blossoming malls of Greensborough, Melbourne.

He made his way to university, procured a BA and worked variously as a proofreader, a copywriter, an IT specialist and as the lead singer in the band Skin, which garnered national commercial airplay for their 1994 EP, Waking Up With You.

As part of the ‘Drowsy Drivers’ project, in 2004 Casey wrote a musical theatre biography of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, KEATING!.

In late 2008, Casey premiered a new project as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival: A Largely Fanciful History Of The Spiegeltent, in which he also starred; he also wrote and performed in 2009's Evening and provided the songs for the ever-threatening Christmas pantomime The Terminativity in 2010–11. He served as dramaturge on Eddie’s Shane Warne: The Musical as well as making contributions to Company B’s The Adventures Of Snugglepot And Cuddlepie and Die Roten Punkte’s Super Musikant and Kunst Rock.

He scored both series of Amanda Brotchie and Adam Zwar's Lowdown and was nominated for an AACTA with Shellie Morris and Tim Cole for work on the 2014 musical documentary Prison Songs. He appeared with Alan Brough as underappreciated alternative rock icons The Narelles in 2015, and has hosted A Swingin' Bella Christmas for the past five years. He has hosted The Show Of The Year for the Wheeler Centre since the show's inception in 2013.

Most recently, he scored the ABC TV series Get Krack!n and is currently working on several things at once, obviously to the detriment of all of them.

Casey has also hosted a regular show on 3CR, worked extensively for PBS FM and made many appearances on 774 ABC Melbourne as host, co-host and guest.

His appearances on ABC TV’s Spicks And Specks resurface occasionally to shame him.

Deadly Funny Comedy National Winner 2014, Steph was named Funniest Aboriginal Woman in Australia. She then moved to Scotland and was runner-up in Hilarity Bites Best Newcomer and a semi-finalist in the prestigious ...

Shaun Micallef is an Australian TV writer/producer/presenter, comedian and sometime actor best known for his work on Full Frontal, The Micallef P(r)ogram(me), Newstopia, Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation, and 15 seasons ...

Mama Alto is a jazz singer, cabaret artiste and gender transcendent diva. She is a transgender and queer person of colour who works with the radical potential of storytelling, strength in softness and power in vulnerability ...

Michele Lee is an Asian-Australian playwright and theatre-maker working across stage, audio and live art. 

Her work is largely narrative-focused, in comedy and drama and explores stories of women, otherness and found families. She has been commissioned by Griffin Theatre Company, Sydney Theatre Company (STC), Malthouse Theatre, Arts House, Next Wave Festival, Darwin Festival, Platform Youth Theatre and St Martins Youth Arts Centre. Current works and works-in-development include Single Ladies (Red Stitch) and Security. Previous works include An assistant's notes for a pandemic (Arts House Refuge project, Hypothetical) Going Down (Malthouse, STC), Rice (Queensland Theatre, Griffin Theatre), Off Centre (STC), The Naked Self (Arts House, FOLA) and Talon Salon (Next Wave Festival, You Are Here, Darwin Festival). Rice won the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, an Australian Writers’ Guild award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, Nick Enright Prize. Her memoir, Banana Girl, is published by Transit Lounge.  

Associate Professor Duffy is an astrophysicist at Swinburne University creating baby universes on supercomputers to understand how galaxies like our Milky Way form and grow within vast halos of invisible dark matter.

He is attempting to find this dark matter as part of SABRE, the world’s first dark matter detector in the Southern Hemisphere at the bottom of a gold mine in Stawell, Victoria. He is also an Associate Investigator in two ARC Centres of Excellence investigating the origin of matter (CAASTRO-3D) and seeing the Universe with gravitational waves (OzGrav).

When not exploring simulated universes Alan lectures in physics as well as science communication at Swinburne University of Technology. Every fortnight Alan tries to explain breaking science from UFO sightings to the latest NASA discoveries on his space segment with ABC Breakfast News TV, ABC Radio Sydney with Robbie Buck and ABC Radio Melbourne with Clare Bowditch. He is also a regular on Ten’s The Project, Nine’s Today Weekends as well as Triple J’s Hack. Most recently Alan presented an episode of ABC's Catalyst and has another episode being released in 2018.

You can hear Alan on ABC Radio National Cosmic Vertigo, see him the in Todd Samson science show Life on the Line or catch him at any number of public speaking events. He’s even toured Australia with the BBC’s Science of Doctor Who show.

He was the Ambassador for the Sydney Science Festival 2016, and host for Famelab showcasing science talent across Australia. 

He wrote and starred in a science show about dark matter, Dark, shown in 148 planetariums in 25 countries worldwide.

His other writing pursuits include his own column in the Conversation and Australia’s most popular science magazine Cosmos.

He was named one of Men’s Style Magazine’s Men of Influence, WA Sunday Time Magazine’s Best and Brightest as well as a finalist for the National Eureka Award for Promoting Understanding of Australian Science Research, Victorian State Finalist in the Fresh Science Award for science communication and Commbank’s Australian of the Day.

Candy Bowers is an award-winning writer, actor, social-activist, comedian and producer. The co-artistic director of Black Honey Company, Candy has pioneered a fierce sub-genre of hip hop theatre that delves into the heart of ...

wāni is a proud descendant of the Bashi peoples of Walungu, as well as the current Incarnation of the Afronaut. He spends his times teleporting through Universes and time-scapes navigating between dreams of becoming the fire-fist pirate king Hokage master of all four elements, and unfolding tales from a generation who quite honestly might be too good for this Universe.

Rebecca Shaw (aka brocklesnitch) is a writer and creator of the parody Twitter account @NoToFeminism, which was developed into an illustrated book. She was on the writing team at Tonightly with Tom Ballard and has written for Hard Quiz and Get Krack!n. She was a writer for the Backburner and deputy editor at SBS Comedy. She’s a Contributing Editor at Kill Your Darlings and has written for the Guardian, Pedestrian, Junkee, Ten Daily and most other places you can think of. In 2018 a song she co-wrote won the 2018 ARIA for best comedy release.

Laura Jean McKay is the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc. 2013), shortlisted for three national book awards in Australia. Her work appears in Meanjin, Overland, Best Australian Stories, the Saturday Paper, and the North American Review. Laura is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne focusing on literary animal studies. She is the ‘animal expert’ presenter on ABC Listen’s Animal Sound Safari. The Animals in That Country (Scribe 2020) is her debut novel.

Dilruk Jayasinha is one of the most in demand headliners on the Australian comedy scene. He has recorded an hour long stand up special for the ABC, and is a regular on Network Ten’s Have You Been Paying Attention? He was also a regular actor on the third season of ABC TV’s award-winning Utopia, and team captain on quiz show CRAM for Network Ten. 

These break out TV performances resulted in Dil receiving the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Popular New Talent at the 2018 Logies. 

Hailing from Sri Lanka, Dilruk relocated to Melbourne to attend university. Having completed a degree in accounting, he started working for one of the 'Big Four.' However, after performing at an open mic night in 2010, that all changed …

In a bittersweet turn of events, Dilruk was unceremoniously fired from his accounting job at the same time his comedy career was taking shape. Just as Dil had, it turns out his managers had noticed that his heart lay elsewhere.

He has been invited to perform all over the country as well as internationally, and in 2017 he completely sold out his run at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with his show The Art of the Dil. He also appeared at the Sydney Opera House that year as part of the Just for Laughs festival. 

Dil returned to Australian festivals in 2018 with his biggest and best show yet Bundle of Joy, culminating with his debut solo show at the Edinburgh Fringe which he followed with a run at Soho Theatre in London’s West End.

Dilruk is certainly making Australia his home.

Ash Flanders is an award-winning writer and performer. As well as acting for other people and creating his own solo work, he runs DIY queer theatre outfit Sisters Grimm with Declan Greene.