Alumni

Internationally acclaimed photojournalist Adam Ferguson has worked in the world’s most dangerous hotspots, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, and Nigeria.

Photographer

Dean West

Dean West is best known for his intricate and highly staged photographs that take everyday occurrences beyond the realm of natural reality. His commercial clients include Disney, MTV, Sony and Fox Sports.

Photographer

Sancintya Simpson

Sancintya Simpson's practice examines the complexities of racial and migratory experiences within Australia. Her work has been exhibited widely at various artist run, commercial and museum galleries.

Visual Artist

Michael Zavros

Winning prestigious art awards and exhibiting in art museums across the world, Michael Zavros is living the dream of a successful visual artist.

Visual Artist

Monica Rohan

Represented by Jan Murphy Gallery in Brisbane and Sophie Gannon Gallery in Melbourne, Monica Rohan paints exaggerated patterns drawn from textiles and foliage, which she says reflect the subconscious.

Jeweller

Bianca Mavrick

Bianca Mavrick’s jewellery label celebrates fashion in playful forms, eclectic motifs and exuberant colours. Her designs have found a place in the international fashion arena.

Designer / Visual Artist

Megan Hess

Megan Hess is one of the world’s most sought after fashion illustrators with a prestigious client list that includes Vanity Fair, Chanel, Dior, Tiffany & Co., Yves Saint Laurent, Vogue, Cartier, and Balenciaga.

Design team

Joel and Kate Booy

For Joel and Kate Booy, studying graphic design at QCAD marked the start of a personal and professional partnership that has spanned two decades, culminating in a collaboration with IKEA and high profile exhibitions around the world.

Designer

Alexander Lotersztain

Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art

Alexander Lotersztain is the founder and chief designer at Derlot—a renowned studio that encompasses everything from products to interiors, furniture, hotel concepts and branding.

Tony Albert

Visual artist

Tony Albert has achieved extraordinary international success and critical acclaim for his visual art practice, which combines text, video, drawing, painting, and 3D objects in combination with kitsch ‘Aboriginalia’ readymades. Tony’s interrogations of Aboriginal representation are both poignant and playful.

In 2003, his final year at the Queensland College of Art and Design, Tony became a founding member of the important urban Aboriginal art collective proppaNOW.

With his exhibition, Visible, Tony was the youngest artist to be featured in a major solo exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. For the Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku, Yalanji man, community and collaboration remains key and this is at the forefront in Visible.

Tony has won a number of major Australian art prizes, including the $65,000 Fleurieu Art Prize, the $50,000 Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, and the $100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize.

^{Image: Tony Albert. Photo credit: Mark Pokorny.}

Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art

Carol McGregor

Visual artist

Carol McGregor is a graduate from Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art and is currently completing her PhD at QCAD.

As a Wathaurung woman, Carol’s art practice is motivated by a desire to unearth and to visually activate histories and memories to strengthen and further inform Australian Aboriginal identity and sense of belonging. A key source of inspiration for Carol is to counter the systematic blanketing and omission of Aboriginal perspectives and stories from accounts of Australian history and to convey the resilience of Indigenous cultural identity.

Since 2008, an important focus of Carol’s artwork has been the possum skin cloak. Before the arrival of Europeans, possum skin cloaks were an essential part of Australian Aboriginal tradition in Victoria. The complex, carefully etched designs on the inside of the skin carried meanings and significances that were understood to their original creators and wearers. Carol sees the cloak as an authoritative medium for healing, cultural renewal and reclamation.

For Carol, one of the most important aspects of her studies at QCAD was the politicisation of her art practice as an Indigenous artist.

^{Image: Carol McGregor. Photo credit: Dale Harding.}

Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art

Dale Harding

Visual artist

Dale Harding’s artistic research sees him extending his cultural inheritance from the sandstone rock art country of Central Queensland to exhibition spaces across Australia and overseas.

The QCAD graduate and doctoral candidate was one of three Australian artists selected to exhibit at Documenta 14 throughout 2017, in Athens and Kassel—the largest global not-for-profit art exhibition. For Documenta 14, Dale spent 18 months extending the practices of Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal rock art and timber carving by developing new forms of cultural expression through silicon moulding and stencilling.

In July, Dale unveiled his large-scale wall work at the Tate Liverpool, as part of the esteemed Liverpool Biennial where he created the piece by blowing his signature vibrant blue colour directly onto the walls of the gallery.

The predominant material used by Dale in both works, Reckitt’s Blue, is an ultramarine pigment and optical whitener that has both family and colonial references. Produced in the UK, the whitener was exported along the colonial frontier to Africa and Australia, where Harding’s mother used it in her job at a laundry.

^{Dale Harding installing Wall Composition in Reckitt’s Blue 2017}
^{See full image credit below.}

Adam Ferguson

Photojournalist

Internationally acclaimed photojournalist Adam Ferguson has worked in the world’s most dangerous hotspots, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, and Nigeria.

Adam has scooped two of the world’s most prestigious photography prizes for his compelling portraits of Nigerian girls recruited as suicide bombers by Boko Haram. Adam was named Photographer of the Year at the Pictures of the Year International competition and took out top prize in the People and Stories category of the World Press Photo awards for the series of images commissioned by The New York Times.

His studies at the QCAD took him from a sleepy existence in Coffs Harbour to the most far flung corners of the globe. "I met a photographer who had studied at QCAD. I was looking for something to get me away and for some reason I connected with the idea of being a photographer. I thought I might try to be a surf photographer, but at QCAD I soon discovered photojournalism and I knew I had found my calling."

^{Image: Adam Ferguson.}

Dean West

Photographer

Dean West is best known for his intricate and highly staged photographs that take everyday occurrences beyond the realm of natural reality. Dean’s meticulously choreographed narratives are equally internationally renowned in both artistic and commercial circles.

After growing up in Gunnedah, NSW, a small mining town five hours inland of Sydney, Dean made his way to study Photography at QCAD and recalls his time studying there as fundamental to his ongoing success: "My experience at the Queensland College of Art and Design was a transformative one, one that has laid the foundation for my ongoing career as an artist and commercial photographer."

Dean’s exponential rise to international acclaim commenced with being recognised as one of Saatchi & Saatchi’s ‘Top 100 Emerging Photographers’ in 2008,
and in the same year being honoured with the title of ‘Advertising Photographer of the Year’ at the International Loupe Awards (2008). His commercial clients include Disney, MTV, Bombay Sapphire, Sony and Fox Sports. His photographs continue to be exhibited and collected around the world and are included in the prestigious collection of Sir Elton John (one of the world’s 12 most influential photography collectors).

^{Image: Dean West.}

Sancintya Simpson

Photographer

Sancintya Mohini Simpson majored in Photographic Art Practices in her Bachelor of Photography degree before going on to complete her Bachelor of Photography with Honours from Queensland College of Art and Design.

Sancintya’s practice examines the complexities of racial and migratory experiences within Australia. Informed by her heritage as a first-generation Australian of Indian- Anglo descent, Sancintya’s work often focuses on her own family’s and community’s experiences–unravelling the untold stories of an existence on the periphery. Through painting, photography, video, performance, prose, and sound, the purpose of her work is to create conversations and tells stories to critique contemporary Australian culture, and colonisation’s problematic histories.

Her work has been exhibited widely at various artist run, commercial and museum galleries. Alongside her artistic practice, Sancintya is Curator of Public Engagement at the Institute of Modern Art where amongst other roles she curates the First Thursdays program.

^{Image: Sancintya Simpson. Photo credit: Savannah van der Niet}

Michael Zavros

Visual Artist

Award-winning artist Michael Zavros turned a childhood passion for drawing into an international art career that has seen his work exhibited in major museums around the world. After graduating from the QCAD with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 1996, it took the emerging young artist just five years to score his first solo exhibition.

He went on to exhibit his work in a string of solo exhibitions at some of the most prestigious galleries in Australia, and made international headlines when he won the world’s richest prize for portraiture—the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize —in 2010. Zavros won the Bulgari Art Award from the Art Gallery of New South Wales two years later, and has since exhibited his work in high-profile solo exhibitions at Art Basel Hong Kong (2015) and Art Los Angeles Contemporary (2016).

As a young artist, he knew he needed an education that would help him to expand his technical skills. He found it at QCAD. ‘Many of the techniques I use haven’t changed
for centuries and I think that’s what’s so wonderful about QCAD—they are really interested in that kind of technical learning,’ he says. ‘I think it’s so important for an artist to understand what’s come before them and how we read art. That better informs the thing you’re making and the artist you are.’

^{Image: Michael Zavros.}

Monica Rohan

Visual Artist

Being named as a finalist in the Archibald Prize, having your work on the cover of Frankie and on show at Gallery of Modern Art ( QAGOMA) alongside Queensland’s finest artists is an incredible achievement for any artist- yet it’s business as usual for Monica Rohan.

"It was so encouraging to be on show at QAGOMA and to be able to interact with the international art scene without having to leave Brisbane," she says. "I’m so thankful for the success I’ve been able to enjoy, which has allowed me to leave my day job and focus solely on my art. The best thing about the Queensland College of Art and Design is the community it creates–it’s still a huge part of my life. All the friends I made there are artists and we continue to support each other."

Represented by Jan Murphy Gallery in Brisbane and Sophie Gannon Gallery in Melbourne, Monica paints exaggerated patterns drawn from textiles and foliage, which she says reflect the subconscious.

^{Image: Monica Rohan.}

Bianca Mavrick

Jeweller

Bianca Mavrick’s jewellery label celebrates fashion in playful forms, eclectic motifs and exuberant colours. Bianca is a graduate of the Jewellery & Small Objects major in the Bachelor of Fine Art and has been designing for her label since 2013.

Her designs with their signature contrasting materials of colour-coated metals, precious metals, stones and plastics have found a place in the international fashion arena and are stocked by a number of high-end retailers, including Anthropologie and Shopbop.

'It’s very exciting to know that there’s a global market for the pieces I create,' said Bianca. Despite the global demand, every piece is designed and constructed in Bianca’s studio in Brisbane, with individual components made by international artisans. 'My clients are really passionate about fashion and love the unique and eccentric nature of my designs, as well as the fact that they are handmade, not mass-produced.'

^{Image: Bianca Mavrick. Photo credit: Savannah van der Niet.}

Megan Hess

Designer / Visual Artist

Since graduating from the Queensland College of Art and Design in 1996 with a Bachelor of Visual Arts, Megan Hess has taken her career to unimaginable heights. After getting her start in graphic design at Brisbane advertising agency MOJO, it was her illustrations for New York Times number one bestselling book, Sex and the City that put her on the international stage and revealed her true passion.

Today, Megan is one of the world’s most sought after fashion illustrators with a prestigious client list that includes Vanity Fair, Chanel, Dior, Tiffany & Co., Yves Saint Laurent, Vogue, Cartier, Balenciaga and First Lady Michelle Obama. Megan has written and illustrated two books: Fashion House, and, Coco Chanel: The Illustrated World of a Fashion Icon.

What is Megan’s advice to young artists? Be open to criticism, be able to work with others and listen to other people’s ideas. Above all, she urges you to find what you are passionate about, really focus on it, and never give up.

^{Image: Megan Hess.}

Kate and Joel Booy

Design team

For Joel and Kate Booy, studying graphic design at the QCAD marked the start of a personal and professional partnership that has spanned two decades, culminating in a collaboration with IKEA and high profile exhibitions around the world.

The duo are now based in The Netherlands and their design studio, Truly Truly, produces multidisciplinary work across objects, furniture, lighting, textiles and spaces. ‘We feel so lucky to be invited to design part of IKEA’s PS collection—it is very well known in Europe and some really big names in the design world have been a part of it,’ Joel said.

The talented pair are hard at work on a range of projects, including a collection of vases for Dutch ceramic company Cor Unum, glass pendant lights for the Nationaal GlasMusuem Netherlands and their own furniture range for an exhibition at the renowned Salone del Mobile in Milan. They credit their time at the QCAD with introducing them to the world of design. ’There is really no recipe or roadmap that you can use to make it. It’s a mix of talent, hours of hard work, good relationships and a tiny dash of luck.’

^{Image: Kate and Joel Booy.}

Alexander Lotersztain

Designer

Alexander Lotersztain is a design visionary. For him, it goes beyond mere aesthetics: ‘Design allows you to find solutions to the big problems facing society and improve people’s lives.’

Alexander is the founder and chief designer at Derlot—a renowned studio that encompasses everything from products to interiors, furniture, hotel concepts and branding. As a new graduate, he undertook an internship in Japan with GK Industrial Design—the company responsible for designing the country’s famed bullet trains. He was named one of the world’s top 100 designers by Phaidon, has had work acquired by the Pompidou Collection in Paris and worked with a raft of high-profile clients including Nestle, Asahi and Virgin.

Alexander relocated from Argentina to study industrial design at the QCAD. ‘I fell in love with the intimacy of the campus, and one of the biggest assets was the collaboration with other students who were studying photography, art, graphic design.’

^{Image: Alexander Lotersztain.}