Jodee Mundy Collaborations is an independent creative producing company formed in 2012, in response to the multiple collaborations and partnerships established and continuing to develop with artists, diverse communities, organisations and funders. The work of this company has shaped and continues to contribute to the ground swell movement of Deaf and Disability Contemporary Arts across Australia and the globe.
Artistic Director Jodee Mundy OAM commits to producing high quality contemporary performance, film, documentary, installations, festivals, public events and artistic interventions.
A multi-award-winning company, recognition includes nomination for Best Direction of a Documentary Short (subject) Imagined Touch by the Australian Directors Guild in 2023. In 2020, an Order of Australia Medal by the Governor General of Commonwealth Australia for Service to the Performing Arts. Jodee is the Recipient of two Green Room Awards: Happy 1000 1000 Bahagia Innovation in Theatre Award in 2000 and Imagined Touch the Deafblind Live Art Experience for Innovation in Experiential Theatre and Contemporary Performance 2017. In 2018, her solo multimedia performance, Personal was nominated for 4 Green Room Awards for Writing, Best Production, Best Visual design and Best Direction. Personal was also nominated for a Helpmann Award for Best Visual/ Physical Production. That same year, Deaf Heart was nominated for a UK Whickers Award for Best Audio Documentary.
The artistic aim is for audiences to witness works that challenge and inspire them to acknowledge: the value of live performance, ritual and our shared humanity; where the art can redefine and reveal cultures of access, equity and inclusiveness. Jodee’s work ultimately points to a future ‘beyond inclusion’, where diversity is inherently valuable to the art. Rather than a point of difference, it is considered a point of commonality.
Jodee Mundy OAM is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural leader working across the independent, small to medium arts sectors, as well as, for festivals and in major art organisations. A creative director, performer, writer, activist, creative producer, executive producer, commissioner, interpreter, film and festival maker, Jodee is a coda (child of Deaf adults) and is the only person who hears as everyone in her immediate family are Deaf. Her mother tongue is Australian Sign Language while English is her second language.
A proud coda member of the Australian Deaf community, in 2019, Jodee was diagnosed with an incurable life-threatening illness. She lives with gratitude for each day and has an acquired disability. As a disabled mother to two young girls, she lives and works on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples in Naarm (Melbourne).
Currently, after six years, Jodee has returned to freelance practice, focussing on national and international touring and screenings of her two works Personal and Imagined Touch. She is developing a children’s book as well as, consulting on arts and disability for various organisations, speaking on panels, mentoring and working on new ideas. Jodee is on the Board of Directors of Next Wave Inc. Australia’s leading artist- led organisation for art making and experimentation by emerging artists.
From 2007-2012, Jodee’s earlier work includes producing and creating Pigeonhole (White Night Melbourne) and When Claude Met Roxy (Brisbane Festival) with collaborator Dan Goronszy through their outfit The CollaborAgents. She directed for the Snuff Puppets, performed with Strange Fruit and co- founded Deaf Arts Network (Arts Access Victoria). In the UK, she worked as a British Sign Language Interpreter with Deafinitely Theatre, Graeae Theatre and for a Deaf TV Program, See Hear on BBC. She also was an Interpreter for Sky News. A company member of Polyglot Theatre since 2007, she performed in multiple shows including We Built This City, Muckheap, Tangle, Paper Planet, Ants and Bellbird, touring to the UK, Ireland, China, Brasil, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan as well as across Australia.
In 2012, Jodee formed, Jodee Mundy Collaborations, her own independent creative producing company. Awarded the Australia Council Structured Mentorship in Community Partnerships, in 2014, Jodee’s works since then have attracted investment from organisations such as Creative Australia, Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, Screen Australia, Vic Screen, City of Melbourne as well as philanthropists including the Besen Foundation, Ian Potter Foundation and The Pratt Foundation.
Her works include: Imagined Touch, a ten-year project, that was created with Deafblind performers Heather Lawson and Michelle Stevens and artists Jen Hector, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey. This culminated into an award- winning live show, installation, research report Inclusion is a Myth and an award- winning film documentary. Premiering at Arts House in 2016 and then at Sydney Festival in 2017, the installation toured to the UK for its European Premiere, presented as part of Spill Festival of Performance at Dance East in Ipswich, and then was presented in London at the Barbican Centre in 2019.
With sell out seasons and reviews to critical acclaim, Imagined Touch received a Green Room Award for Innovation in Experiential Theatre in 2017 and was nominated for Best Direction for a Documentary Short (subject) by the Australian Directors Guild in 2023.
In 2015, A Sanctuary in the City, commissioned by the City of Melbourne, was an installation created with primary carers and family members with disability over a one-year period. Installed along the Yarra River, this participatory work, film and installation attracted over two thousand of the general public to enter, take respite and reflect on how people can better care for themselves and their wellbeing.
In 2018, Jodee premiered a solo multimedia performance called Personal which premiered at Arts House exploring her experience as the only hearing person in her Deaf family. Presented in Auslan and English, Personal was then presented at the Sydney Opera House as part of the inaugural Unwrapped festival, followed by a tour to nine venues across regional Victoria with a final season at Darwin Festival. Personal was nominated for four Green Room Awards for Production, Writing, Direction and Design and for a Helpmanns Award for Best Visual or Physical Production. Jodee was artist in residence at La Boite Theatre and Artist in Residence at Arts Centre Melbourne developing new works around Disability Arts Practice.
In 2019, Jodee received a 2019 Scholarship from the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Arts to study a Masters in Fine Art- Cultural Leadership. Soon after, she became Head of Festival and Events for the City of Darebin and became the founding and inaugural Director of FUSE, a new multi- arts festival in Melbourne’s inner north.
Launched in March 2020 until March 2023, she started out with a team of four staff and grew it to a team of nine. Her role was to executive produce and creatively lead the team as they collectively designed, pivoted and delivered five festivals (online/hybrid and in person) during Melbourne’s six lock downs. She had oversight of multiple commissions and partnerships with a particular focus on working with First Nations artists, Artists of colour, Artists who are from the LGBTIQA+ community and artists who are Deaf and Disabled. Highlight projects include: Curators in Residence Program, Ganbu Gulin (One Mob), created with the Darebin Aboriginal Advisory Committee and the Wurundjeri Council, as Executive Producer of film documentary Ganbu Gulin (SBS Acquistion for NITV), Take Back! presented with Multicultural Arts Victoria featuring twenty artists of colour (Best Variety Show Green Room Awards 2021), Out of the Park Picnic presented with Multicultural Arts Victoria, The Last Dance by All the Queens Men, An Uncertain Time ( Pony Cam), and Sarah Austin, An Uncertain Time (Contemporary Performance for Children and Families, Green Room Awards 2022).
In 2020, the Tarrawarra Museum of Art and Victoria Together commissioned Jodee to create a short film called, Killing Time featuring her partner and two small children, exploring their time during the pandemic as they lived through the six lock down periods in Melbourne. It is a colourful, intense and dynamic film, creatively captioned and on the film festival circuit.
In 2020, she was awarded an Order of Australia medal (OAM) for Service to the Performing Arts.
In 2022, Jodee was part of the SYNC Leadership Cohort, a disability led coaching program. Also in 2022, her film documentary Imagined Touch which she produced and directed (written and co-directed by Sofya Gollan) was screened at the Other Film Festival, at the Australian Centre of Moving Image, as part of the inaugural Alter State Festival.
In 2023, it was an official selection in the Melbourne Women in Film Festival, then was selected as part of ReelAbilities Film Festival in New York followed by a screening at the infamous Lincoln Center.
In September and October 2023, Jodee toured her show Personal to Brisbane Festival at Metro Arts and then toured to six venues in Sydney, NSW, Bendigo and Melbourne after a five-year performing hiatus. This tour attracted widely sold out shows with significant interest coming from abroad for its third and future tour.
From 2023, Jodee was Creative Lead of Alter State, a biannual, award-winning Disability- Led contemporary arts festival co-founded and co-presented by Arts Centre Melbourne and Arts Access Victoria.
Alter State was awarded for Contribution to the Sector by the Green Room Awards 2023 under the leadership of Caroline Bowditch. Jodee was honoured to take Alter State to the next step held in October 2024 at Arts Centre Melbourne and expanding Alter State to an extra eight venues across Melbourne making this the largest Disability- led Arts festival in the southern hemisphere.
She has been a peer assessor for the Australia Council, for Creative Victoria, Arts House City of Melbourne and for the City of Darebin and sits on a number of advisory panels including the Evolution of Disability Arts in Australia, a Research Project in partnership with Arts Access Victoria, Universities of Melbourne and Queensland.
Her passion is to share knowledge and opportunities artists, cultural leaders and arts professionals from marginalised backgrounds in order to increase cultural equity, leadership diversity and representation- across stages, screens and public spaces. She has mentored many artists from a wide range of backgrounds, many of whom are Deaf and Disabled artists.
She curated a six- month professional development program Arts Activated for Arts Access Victoria, which was presented in Auslan, and curated for Arts Centre Melbourne three panels including: State of Deaf Arts, The Future of Inclusive Leadership and Disability Arts: The Last Avante Garde. She has been a mentor for artists as part of Melbourne Fringe Professional Development programs, Midsumma Pathways, RedHot Arts and for Flow Festival.
Jodee trained in Animateuring (theatre making) at the Victorian College of the Arts, in physical theatre at the Ecole De Mime Corporeal Dramatique in London, in Solo Arts Practice at Victoria University and in Interpreting and Translation of British Sign Language at the University of Central Lancashire. She is a Fellow of the Centre of Sustainable Leadership and a Fellow of Sync Leadership, a disabled-led programme exploring Deaf and Disabled leadership.