Good news at the Convent: the Artists-in-Residence for 2025 – 2026 have been selected!
We are pleased to welcome three formidable new additions to the Convent creative community.
Each year, Abbotsford Convent invites applications from artists and creative industries leaders to engage with our unique precinct through two Studio Residencies. These unique opportunities offer creative practitioners time, space and support to undertake site-specific or responsive research, investigation and consideration.
Abbotsford Convent is thrilled to announce this year’s successful artists :
Carmen Yih (Jul — Dec 2025)
Kate Davis (Jan — Mar 2026)
Helen Svoboda (Mar —Jun 2026)
Maggie Maguire Artist-In-Residence
Carmen Yih is the recipient of this year’s Maggie Maguire Residency for early career artists.
Carmen is an artist whose practice skates along the boundaries of hybrid dance-theatre, telling urgent stories that draw on forgotten histories and marginalised voices. In her work, Carmen uses movement scores and structures influenced by non-Western narrative world-building, immersive theatre, and street and club dance forms.
Carmen’s residency will help develop her current project, to disappoint a god, a hybrid Asian-futurist dance-theatre work using Nuwa (女媧), a Chinese mythological creation deity as a vessel to call for personal reflection and accountability amid the global breakdown of climate, culture and communication.
https://hitahhchi.cargo.site
@hitahhchi
The Maggie Maguire Residency is made possible by a generous gift from the The Patagorang Foundation, founded by Roger Allen and Maggie Gray in honour of Abbotsford Convent’s first CEO, Maggie Maguire OAM.
Abbotsford Convent Artist-In-Residence
This year, we have two wonderful artists selected for our Abbotsford Convent Studio Residency,
Kate Davis is a highly accomplished artist, designer, director, and dramaturg working across contemporary performance and visual arts. Kate is a pioneer of her unique performance style, having played a key role in shaping and nurturing the contemporary performance landscape over the last two decades.
Kate will use her residency to develop ALTAR, a new body of work investigating themes of death, devotion, and decomposition. This work will be comprised of miniature sculpture, installation, video, sound, and photography in order to confront our deep-seated fear and aversion to death, while simultaneously honouring the dying process.
https://www.kate-davis.com.au/
@theladykate
Helen Svoboda is an award-winning double bassist, vocalist, and composer with a practice grounded in experimental performance, abstract songwriting, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her current works explore language and lyrical structures in conjunction with traditional performance styles.
Throughout her residency, Helen will be exploring the intersection of language, memory, and vocal improvisation to reconnect with her Finnish heritage — drawing on her childhood experiences in the country and translating them into a performative context to reestablish a meaningful connection to culture and self.
http://www.helensvoboda.com
@helensvoboda_music