Texting Images: Launch

Autumn Royal creates drama, poetry, and criticism. She is the founding editor of Liquid Architecture’s Disclaimer journal and has served as the interviews editor at Cordite Poetry Review since 2016. Her poetry collection, The Drama Student (Giramondo 2023), was shortlisted for the 2023 Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.

Autumn is the facilitator of this year’s Texting Images program, and led the artists into workshops that culminated in the final reading at BLINDSIDE. 

Jean Claire Dy is a Filipino-Chinese writer, filmmaker, and media artist based in Melbourne. After a decade away from creative writing, she returned with a speculative fiction story published in Evolve last year. She writes poetry and literary nonfiction, with a poetry collection forthcoming in 2027 and a memoir-in-progress tracing her travels across China and beyond. Her work draws on a life lived across the world. She is completing a PhD in documentary filmmaking at the VCA, University of Melbourne. Her documentary A House in Pieces won the Golden Hercules Award at Kasseler Dokfest and screened at 50 international festivals.

Lana Eileen is a multidisciplinary visual artist, musician and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, performed around the world, and taken part in artist residencies in both Iceland and Sweden. In 2026, she was a writer-in-residence with Lighthouse Arts for the Hunter Writers’ Centre. Her poetry has been published in Mensicus, The Marrow, Sextet and Lamplit, and she is undertaking a Master of Writing and Publishing at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Leo Bagus Purnomo is a Naarm/Melbourne–based artist and researcher, born in Central
Java, Indonesia. Working across multiple mediums—including painting, performance, and
lukisan—his practice examines epistemic structures and the ways they shape our understanding of ourselves and the world. Leo holds an MFA from the VCA and is currently a PhD candidate at MADA, exploring how animist, mystic, and occult epistemic frameworks present in Javanese Kejawen can be incorporated into contemporary art.

Mia Thomson is an emerging writer of creative non-fiction and poetry, living and working on Wurundjeri Country. She is an Honours student in the Creative Writing program at The University of Melbourne where she is researching and writing about the sticky intersections between sex and plastic. Her work is generally interested in Queer theory, hybrid forms and fragmentation. Her writing has previously been published in Verge and Slush Mag.