PRESIDENT’S LETTER

The 2023 APDG Awards were held this year at Federation Hall in Melbourne. The event went off without a hitch and I would like to congratulate Rebecca Whittington and the awards team for what proved to be a flawless event.

Amongst the award recipients was this year’s lifetime achievement winner, Jennifer Irwin. What an extraordinary body of work Jennifer has produced, particularly within dance, opera and musicals. As a young design student studying at NIDA, I was lucky enough to be seconded to Jennifer and observed at close hand the remarkable design work she was producing with Graham Murphy and the Sydney Dance Company. She opened a window into a whole new world of design creation which was a lightning bolt to my formative design thinking. Congratulations Jennifer on a remarkable career.

As we know, accreditation is the highest honour we can bestow on an APDG member, so with that in mind, I’d like to congratulate our newly accredited members, production designers Tracey Trix Collins, Alex Holmes, Helen O’Loan and designer and set decorator Karla Urizar.

International Production Design Week is a celebration of production designers from around the world. Events will take place across the globe, in person and online and will include panels, workshops, screenings and social gatherings. In true APDG fashion, we are busy making these events our own, by celebrating not just production designers, but all designers in the screen and live performance industries across Australia. We are currently planning both industry and social events with our partners and state liaison representatives.

The APDG will also be celebrating IPDW by creating a new season of APDG Dialogues in Design featuring both established screen and live performance designers and their work online over the course of the week. The final APDG Dialogues in Design will be a live conversation between emerging designers from across the country sharing their experiences since starting out in their respective industries.

The updates to the Live Performance Design Guidelines have been completed and it will be ready for publication in the coming weeks. The Manual for Screen Design Practices is also undergoing an update, if you have the wisdom and capacity to contribute to this update, please get in touch with the APDG Screen Committee.

No matter your design role or industry, I also encourage you to complete the APDG Green Survey.

Warm regards,

– Michael Scott-Mitchell APDG

Michael Scott-Mitchell APDG