Celebrating our 2027 Paris Art Fellows

Dr Betty Sargeant (she/they) is an internationally acclaimed media artist whose practice operates at the intersection of art, science and technology. Sargeant's immersive and public artworks have been exhibited at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the Karachi Biennale, the Experimenta International Triennial of Media Art, Questacon (Australia's national science and technology museum), Melbourne Museum and the Asia Culture Centre in South Korea, where her work is held in their permanent collection. Sargeant's work sits in seven public collections across Australia and South Korea, and she has received multiple Good Design Awards, a Victorian Premier's Design Award, a Consensus Innovation Award, the Melbourne Knowledge Fellowship and the Rupert Bunny Foundation Visual Art Fellowship. In 2019 Sargeant represented Australia in a federal government cultural delegation through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, helping form new global creative partnerships and collaborations. Dr Sargeant holds a PhD in Creative Media from RMIT University, and she lives in Naarm, Melbourne.

James Nguyen (he/him) was born in Bảo Lộc, Việt Nam. He currently writes and makes art in Murrumbeena, Naarm. His multiform work is concerned with the contradictions of translation, decolonial revenge and finding intimacy in fragmented worlds.  

Nguyens’ ground-breaking projects have been presented at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, ACCA, the Sydney Opera House, MCA Australia, IMA and NOWNESS Asia among others. Nguyen was also selected as an ABC Top5 Researcher for the Arts and received the UNSW Dean’s Award for his PhD, later published into the book ‘Làm Chó Bò/Making Trouble’ by Discipline.

Joel Spring is a Wiradjuri interdisciplinary artist, based in Sydney/Gadigal/Wangal lands, working collaboratively on projects that examine ways of seeing Country through technology and desires for Indigeneity. His current work confronts and channels both the desire for land and minerals at the core of our national identity and what today appear as progressive identity formations.

Exploring the potential of Indigenous materialist readings of art and architecture towards repatriation, reparation, and return of land, Joel is learning how to employ art making, exhibition making, publishing and pedagogy within what is recognised as black or Indigenous studies.

Ken + Julia Yonetani are an Australian-Japanese artist duo. Their installations are often monumental, immersive experiences. Their work has gained international attention for its combination of unusual materials and dramatic beauty, and for touching on contemporary environmental and social issues in a way that is interactive, engaging and visually stunning. They have exhibited in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, including as part of the Australian representation for the Venice Biennale of Art (2009). They have had solo exhibitions at venues such as the National Gallery of Australia (2015) and Mori Art Museum Collection Tokyo (2019), and held a major survey show in Japan at the newly constructed Kadokawa Culture Museum in 2021-2. Recent exhibitions include Matsumoto Art and Architecture Festival Japan (2024), Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale Korea (2024), and Matsu Bienniale Taiwan (2025). Both have unusual career paths, Ken was originally a foreign exchange broker and Julia a lecturer in History, prior to embarking on a career in visual art. Ken holds a PhD in Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, and Julia a PhD in History from ANU, and a BA from the University of Sydney. They are represented by Mizuma Art Gallery, Singapore and Tokyo. 

Will Visconti completed his PhD jointly between French Studies & Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. His first book, Beyond the Moulin Rouge: The Life & Legacy of La Goulue (University of Virginia Press) was published in 2022, and his next project, Laughter: A Documentary History, 1800-1920 (Routledge) is due out in early 2027. He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Urban Sex Work: A Transnational Study, for which he will spend 3 months in Paris thanks to the Virginia Spate Research Fellowship.

Dr Suzannah Henty is an early-career art historian and Hugh Ramsay Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. In 2025, she was jointly awarded her PhD from the University of Melbourne and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Her research, situated at the intersection of Australian art history, decolonial theory, and national identity, has been published in Radical Philosophy, Index Journal, The Funambulist, Jerusalem Quarterly, and Kunstlicht.