Sarah Austin

Sarah is an award-winning theatre-maker and researcher with a specific expertise in working with children and young people and has created original performance and collaborated with companies across Australia and internationally. Sarah graduated with Honours with a Bachelor of Creative Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2002, and went on to complete her Masters of Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne in 2005.

She has worked as a Research Associate on an ARC Linkage-funded project investigating Disability Arts in Australia known as The Last Avant Garde (2015-2019) with national colleagues including Dr Eddie Paterson, Kath Duncan and Madeline Little. Sarah has presented and published widely on her research interests including at a range of national and international fora and in 2019 was a keynote speaker at CONVERGE: a national symposium on Young People and The Arts in Australia. In 2020, with colleague Rinske Ginsberg, Sarah was awarded a Creativity and Wellbeing Research institute seed funding grant for their project Home Truths; Embodied storytelling practices with justice-involved young people.
Sarah is a Lecturer in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts (FFAM) and in 2018 was the recipient of the Veronica Kelly Prize for Best Postgraduate paper at the Australasian Drama Studies Association (ADSA) conference. Sarah completed her practice as research (PaR) PhD in 2020. This project applied a practice-based lens to consider a rights-based process for working with children and young people and interrogate what might be an ethical framework for collaboration that takes in the process of creation and the aesthetic result. Sarah has held a number of professional and freelance creative roles in the industry, including Artistic Director/CEO of St Martins Youth Arts Centre (2008-2014) and has worked on projects and for organisations in the UK, Singapore and Germany.
Sarah is currently co-Chair of the Contemporary and Experimental Performance panel of the Green Room Awards Association and a Board Member of theatre company Outer Urban Projects.