Announcing the cohort of artists joining the Gertrude Studio Program in 2026

Gertrude is pleased to announce the 2026 cohort of incoming Gertrude Studio Program artists: Azza Zein, Beth Maslen, Callum McGrath, Hootan Heydari, Jahkarli Romanis (recipient of Gertrude's 2026 First Nations Studio), Kait James, Spencer Lai and Tommaso Nervegna-Reed.

A selection committee consisting of Gertrude staff, a current studio artist, a previous studio artist and an external arts professional convened to assess applications for this 2-year studio program. A panel of First Nations advisory peers convened to select the recipient of Gertrude’s First Nations Studio.
 
These artists were chosen with the aim of supporting innovative artists at key moments in the development of their practices, and representing a broad expanse of creative practices.

Azza Zein

Azza Zein is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living in Narrm Melbourne. Her installations and writing explore the dematerialisation of the economy, the invisibility of labour and the economic conditions surrounding mobility and trade. She is particularly interested in revaluing the decorative act, examining migrant materials through the lens of modernity’s iconoclastic aesthetics and the violence of displacement.

Her work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally, with residencies in Argentina, India, Mparntwe Alice Springs, and the Santa Fe Art Institute (NM, USA). In 2026, she is a Bundanon artist in residence.

She has published in journals like Art + Australia, Kohl Journal for Body and Gender Research, Memo Review and un Extended. She has contributed an essay to the Care Ethics and Art anthology (Routledge) and catalogue essays to ACCA publications. In 2025, she was un Projects guest-editor for issue19.2 We swear we saw this. Drawings about notebooks and notebooks about the Wor(l)ds.
She was a member of un Projects editorial committee (2021-2024) and the Women’s Art Register committee (2021-2023). As a sessional academic, she has taught studio art and theory at several universities, including the American University of Beirut, La Trobe University and the Victorian College of the Arts. 

Zein holds an MFA from the Victorian College of Arts, the University of Melbourne (2020) and a PhD in economics from Texas A&M University (2005). 

Beth Maslen

Beth Maslen is a Naarm Melbourne-based artist originally from Boorloo Perth, Western Australia. Working across sculpture and photography in installation, her practice engages familiar objects and materials to generate poetic alternatives to existing frameworks of understanding. Found and domestic objects are transformed from familiar references into structures that question utility and ornamentation. Her installations balance form and fragility in both materiality and comprehension.

Maslen holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from Monash University. Recent exhibitions include Way to Go at Minerva, Sydney (2025), People always leave things on the street for each other at Animal House Fine Arts, Naarm Melbourne (2025), Handbags at Connors Connors, Naarm Melbourne (2025), and MATERIAL at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Naarm Melbourne (2024). She is currently represented by Animal House Fine Arts.

Callum McGrath

Callum McGrath is a Brisbane Meanjin born research-artist now based in Naarm Melbourne whose explores relationships between historicisation and systems of power in queer contexts. McGrath’s practice interrogates the ways that powerful structures dictate how historical data is sustained and reproduced. His practice is driven by a continual questioning of the status of truth in history and the conditions of knowledge.

McGrath has exhibited across Australian, with recent exhibitions that include; The Ramsay Art Prize 2025, Art Gallery of South Australia, Tarntanya Adelaide (2025); Unbecoming, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo (2025), You Get to Determine the Reality, MADA Gallery, Naarm Melbourne (2024), The Party, UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2023); Embodied Knowledge, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin Brisbane (2022). In 2025 McGrath co-curated You are Here Too at the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane with an accompanying publication. He is a founding contributor to KINK, a collective researching histories of queer Australian art. In 2024 McGrath completed his PhD with Monash Art Design and Architecture at Monash University.

Hootan Heydari

Hootan Heydari is a Tehran-born, Naarm Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist. His practice spans photography, sculpture, and installation, investigating how memory persists not as a stable record but as residue, rhythm, and continual return. A recurring point of anchor is the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran, not as biography but as a reverberation that shapes his engagement with the past.

Heydari holds a First-Class Honours degree from RMIT University and a Master of Fine Arts by research from the Victorian College of Arts. He was awarded the Art 150 Fellowship in 2024. Selected solo exhibitions include Remembering to Forget, Bundoora Homestead (2025) Your Place is Empty, Conners Conners (2024), The Past is Present, Futures Gallery (2023).

He is a sessional lecturer at RMIT University and has been an active member of the City of Melbourne Public Art Advisory Panel since 2024. He is represented by Futures Gallery, Naarm Melbourne.

Jahkarli Romanis
First Nations Studio

Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis is a proud Pitta Pitta woman and artist. Her work challenges colonial image-making practices and interrogates the biases embedded within different imaging technologies. Spanning photography, moving image and spoken word, her practice is informed by family stories, histories and institutional archival research. 

Jahkarli recently completed a PhD at Monash University through the Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. In 2025, she was the winner of the Multimedia Category at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (Telstra NATSIAA), held on Larrakia Country in Darwin. She is currently working towards her first major acquisitive commission for the National Gallery of Victoria as part of the Country Road x First Nations Commissions (2026). 

Kait James

Kait James is a Wadawurrung artist whose practice reclaims and recontextualises mass-produced objects and public spaces to challenge the erasure and commodification of First Nations culture. Drawing on both her Indigenous and Anglo heritage, she interrogates stereotypes and colonial narratives through a lens that is critical, subversive, and grounded in truth-telling. Her work honours the endurance of her ancestors and asserts the ongoing sovereignty of First Peoples in contemporary Australia.

Working across textiles, print, sculpture and public art, Kait brings attention to the ways Indigenous voices have been silenced or misrepresented, offering new narratives connected to Country and lived experience. Through humour, colour and sharp cultural commentary, she invites viewers to reflect on what has been overlooked or erased, while celebrating the continuity and vitality of her community.

James' work is held in public and private collections across Australia, support she’s grateful for as she continues to develop her practice.

Spencer Lai

Spencer Lai’s work explores how consumerism, cultural objects, and everyday ephemera shape identity. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, and expanded painting, he collects and reassembles materials, images, texts, and design fragments from personal and consumer cultures to form associative compositions and assemblages. Through reworking and reconfiguring accumulated cultural detritus, Spencer’s practice reflects on the relationships between cultural forms, value, personhood, identity formation, and the unconscious. 

Lai has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Impressions Mackintosh Lane, London (2025); Modes, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2024); He has left us alone but shafts of light sometimes grace the corner of our rooms: Lotus-Eaters, Asbestos, Melbourne (2023); Let us be silent so that we may hear the whisper of God: strained tremors of life rise from dark billows of muteness as a modern wind soars beneath engineered wings, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2023); Academy for the Sensitive Arts, Theta, New York (2022).

Recent group exhibitions include I <3 Lizzy, Neon Parc, Naarm Melbourne (2025); At Home with Painting, School of Art Gallery, Sydney (2024); Backwash, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra (2023); You’re Finally Awake!, Theta, New York (2022).

Spencer Lai is represented by Neon Parc, Naarm Melbourne.

Tommaso Nervegna-Reed 

Tommaso Nervegna-Reed works across a range of media including painting, video, photography, sculpture and installation. Informed by the internal logics present in conceptual art, his practice often subverts existing media or cultural objects by repositioning them in new and generative ways. Whether it be Venetian blinds wrapped in plaster bandages, a video of a light therapy session, or paintings of DVDs whose titles range from ‘corporate crime’ to ‘personality disorders’. Nervegna-Reed draws upon seemingly novel experiences which he cuts-up and reassembles in unconventional ways. Through various formal techniques he transforms their original meaning – whilst simultaneously exposing their inherit structures – in an attempt to unpack our shared visual culture. 

Tommaso Nervegna-Reed (b. 1996) completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours in 2021 at Monash University. Nervegna-Reed has exhibited at range of galleries including Sutton Projects, Animal House Fine Arts, Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Working at Heights, Cache, Rushes, Haydens, Conners Conners, Caves and Cathedral Cabinet.