Meet our new co-Artistic Director

Arts House welcomes Nithya Nagarajan

Arts House is excited to announce the appointment of Nithya Nagarajan to the role of co-Artistic Director, sharing responsibility for directing our program with Emily Sexton. We are delighted that Arts House’s vision of distributed curation will now be expressed through our artistic leadership.

Nithya Nagarajan is a contemporary performance maker and curator working across Australia and the Asia Pacific. She has 12 years’ experience in programming, creative producing, international engagement and transformative justice in the arts.

On her appointment, Nithya comments: “The program at Arts House has always offered a provocation about our world and our times. It’s a hotbed for experimental practice: oscillating between the artist’s social consciousness and their capacity for poetry, for beauty and for truth. I have engaged with Arts House as an audience member, as an institutional partner and most recently as a resident artist in 2021.

I look forward to bringing my whole self to this work: as an artist, as an arts worker, as a person of Tamil ancestry, as a settler (and the responsibilities that brings), and as a woman of colour. I am cognisant of the civic duty this appointment carries to underrepresented communities in a sector where diverse cultural leadership remains lacking within our publicly funded institutions. I am delighted to take this step with Emily Sexton and the wider team at Arts House who always aim to provide infrastructures of intentional care for artists and the public.” 

Emily Sexton says: “I am so delighted to welcome a leader of Nithya’s calibre and skill to the Arts House team. Her intelligence, knowledge and expansive sector relationships in Australia and beyond put her in such a great position to lead our program. And on a personal level, I’m grateful for the opportunity to grow and learn together.”

Nithya commences full time in the role on April 19 and our powerhouse pair will share the position for six months from November 2022.

Image: Dorcas Tang