Meet the artists who will be staying at our Paris studio in 2026.
We are delighted to announce our four Paris Residency Fellows for 2026: Brenda L Croft, Rosie Isaac, Kate Just and Farnaz Dadfar.
The four Fellows were selected by an expert panel that included Power Institute Director Professor Mark Ledbury, artist Professor Julie Rrap, curator Sebastian Goldspink, and art history Associate Professor Donna Brett. This year the panel's task was especially difficult: we experienced a huge swell of interest in the Residency, receiving our highest ever number of applications that almost doubled last year's total.
Below you can learn more about each of our Fellows, and the projects they have planned for Paris in 2026.
The Fellowships are made possible thanks to the generous support of Nicholas Curtis AM and Angela Curtis.
Learn more about the Paris Residencies
Join us for a reception to celebrate our Fellows on 26 November 2025
Residency Projects
Brenda Croft
The fellowship will enable Brenda to build on prior work undertaken in Paris and France to research French and other international collections, especially at the Musée du quai Branly, and to extend her relationships and connections with other curators, artists, and other colleagues in the cultural sector. Key to Brenda's residency will be her positionality as a creative-led researcher - visual artist, curator, educator, researcher/scholar - building on her work's inclusion in ON COUNTRY: Photography from Australia in Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France (2025); and recent selection for the 9th Triennale of Photography Hamburg, Germany, 2026.
Farnaz Dadfar
Farnaz’s residency will focus on archival research and the development of a new body of work that traces how political trauma is collectively carried across generations. It explores how the visual language of material expression can serve as a vessel for memory and remembrance within site-specific, cross-cultural contexts. The project examines the multilayered concept of historical erasure, reflecting on states of rupture and resilience.
Rosie Isaac
Rosie's research in Paris will begin with the history of the metric system and the measurement of the transit of Venus in the 18th century. This research will be guided by questions such as: What are the consequences of empiricism and objectivity on our ability to imagine social and material change? How do the links between science and colonialism continue into the present? Drawing on this historical research, Rosie will develop a video work that moves between the past, present and a speculative future, to be filmed at astronomical observatories across France.
Kate Just
Kate’s residency in Paris will continue her research into art archives, feminism and the relationship between textiles and politics. She will explore histories of feminist and queer art in the AWARE Women's Art Archive in Paris and visit significant textile art collections including the Musée de La Mode Et Du Textiles, Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs, and Musée de Cluny, where she will study the famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestries (c. 1500), inscribed with “À mon seul désir” (to my only desire) – perceived as a reference to women’s free will. In the studio, Just will develop a personal new body of sewn textile sculptures and knitted works inspired by her research.
People
Brenda L Croft
Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra Peoples, Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and has Anglo-Australian/Chinese/German/Irish/Scottish heritage. For four decades Brenda has undertaken a leading role in national and international First Nations and broader contemporary arts/cultural sectors as a multi-disciplinary creative practitioner (academic, administrator, artist, curator, educator, researcher, scholar). Brenda’s creative work is represented in major national and international public and private collections, and she has being the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, commissions and grants for academic and creative-led research. Since 2021 she has been Professor of Indigenous Art History & Curatorship at the Australian National University, and states she is privileged to live and work on unceded sovereign Kamberri/Ngambri/Ngunawal homelands. Brenda’s creative-led academic research encompasses Critical Indigenous Performative Collaborative Autoethnography and Storywork methodologies and theoretical frameworks. In her ANU role Brenda co-leads an ANU Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Grand Challenge, 'Murrudha; Sovereign Walks - tracking cultural actions through art, Country, language and music', with colleagues from SOAD and Fenner School of Environment and Society, working closely with and guided by First Nations communities, including Dhurga-Yuin/Ngambri/Ngunawal/Monaro- Ngarigo/Walgalu-Wiradyuri Peoples. In 2024 Brenda was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University.
Farnaz Dadfar
Born in Tehran, Farnaz Dadfar is an interdisciplinary Iranian-Australian artist based in Sydney. Her practice spans sculpture, painting, installation, video, and text, exploring the notion of diaspora through the lens of migration and storytelling. Motivated by exilic sensations and hybrid positions, her experimental and polyphonic expressions reinterpret the ambivalent legacies of Eastern–Western juxtapositions through fragmented themes of displacement, cultural identity, and nomadism, tracing visceral connections between lived experience, research, and artistic practice. Farnaz has exhibited in galleries and museums across Australia, Germany, Indonesia, and Iran, including Annandale Galleries (Sydney), QUT Art Museum (Brisbane), Linden New Art (Melbourne), Spinnerei (Leipzig), Sarang Building (Yogyakarta), and Saba Cultural Artistic Institute (Tehran). She has received numerous grants and awards, including the Paulette Isabel Jones Career Development Award, the Arthur Macquarie Travelling Scholarship, the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship – SCA Travel, the Anne Runhardt Art Award (Notfair), the David Richards Drawing Award, and the VCA Galloway Lawson Prize. Farnaz holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney and is a sessional academic at Sydney College of the Arts.
Rosie Isaac
Rosie Isaac (b. Naarm/Melbourne, 1990) is an artist with a research-based sculpture, writing, video and performance practice. Rosie is interested in artmaking as a form of attention to material, social and linguistic systems. Her recent projects have looked at waste, soil chemistry, the law, libraries and reading. Rosie has shown work across the National Gallery of Victoria, West Space, Conduction, Liquid Architecture, Next Wave and Gertrude Contemporary among others. She is a sessional academic at MADA, Monash University.
Kate Just
Kate Just is an artist of Polish, Irish, German and Scottish descent (born USA, migrated to Australia 1996). Her visual art practice and research is focussed on the use of knitting, sewing, textiles and photo-media to explore feminist, queer and political histories through the lens of her own personal experiences. In addition to her solo practice, Just also works in community contexts to create large scale public art projects that tackle significant social issues including gender-based violence, reproductive freedom and LGBTQIA rights. Kate Just holds a PhD in Sculpture (Monash University), an MA (RMIT), and a BFA (VCA), where she is a Senior Lecturer in Art. Just has exhibited extensively across Australia; her work is held in numerous collections including NGA, NGV, and AGSA. She has won many awards and grants for her work including the Australia Council Visual Art Fellowship, The Wangaratta Textile Prize, The British Council Realise Your Dream Award and the Rupert Bunny Fellowship. Internationally she has exhibited at AIR Gallery (USA), the Rijswijk Museum (Netherlands), Kunsthalle Krems (Austria), Youkobo Artspace (Japan), Contextile Biennale (Portugal) and Suwon Museum of Art (South Korea). Kate Just is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery in Adelaide.