Jacina Leong

Dr Jacina Leong 梁玉明 is an artist-curator, researcher and educator working across cultural, educational and social impact contexts. Her practice examines how cultural organisations facilitate gathering in response to crisis while interrogating the systemic conditions that shape arts and cultural work. Drawing on 18 years of experience in organisational leadership, transdisciplinary research, and socially engaged creative practice, she addresses social infrastructure and infrastructural critique; the entanglement of climate crisis, burnout, and arts labour; and the politics and ethics of care. She is also concerned with what it means to sustain practice, and toward what end, often thinking with meridians, breath, and composting as metaphor, method, and ethic.

From 2023 to 2024, she was Acting CEO/Director of Next Wave, leading organisational strategy, partnerships, and long-term planning for the not-for-profit organisation and developing cross-sector collaborations with A Climate for Art and CAST (Contemporary Art and Social Transformation), and securing a nine-year tenancy of the Brunswick Mechanics Institute.

Her earlier roles span governance, leadership, curatorial, and public engagement work alongside sustained higher education practice as a researcher, educator, and postgraduate supervisor. This includes Co-Chair (2023-2025) and Co-Director of Bus Projects (2021–2022); Public Programs Curator at The Cube (2012–2017) and Ipswich Art Gallery (2009–2011); Gallery Manager at Jan Murphy Gallery (2011–2012); Creative Producer for the Creative Industries Precinct (2008); mentor for the ACMI CEO Digital Mentoring Program (2022); and co-founder of the Ars Electronica Guerrilla Knowledge Unit (2017).

Jacina is currently a Research Fellow (School of Education) at RMIT University on the ARC Discovery Project Making Histories: Young People as Visual Historians of Changing Cities. She lectures in contemporary art theory and research methods in the School of Art, chairs the School of Art Industry Advisory Committee, and is lead co-author of the forthcoming book Museums and Digital Social Futures: Audience Experiences in Everyday Life (Routledge). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) and a Master’s by Research from QUT, and a PhD from RMIT University.