Launchpad 2.0 Participants 2026

Launchpad 2.0 is Creative Engine’s year-long artist development program, designed to help original performance works grow from idea to stage.

Created in response to artist feedback, the program provides ongoing support, mentorship and development opportunities for artists as they shape and refine their work.

This year’s Launchpad 2.0 cohort showcases a diverse range of perspectives, creative approaches and storytelling forms. Meet the artists and discover the exciting new projects taking shape through the program.

Psyched
Serah Nathan

Serah Nathan’s Psyched is a text-based theatre work set in a private psychiatric clinic on the day a rebrand campaign disrupts the fragile lives of its patients, blending comedy with an exploration of longing and emotional dislocation.

Negative Gearing 
Kath Dolheguy 

Kath Dolheguy’s Negative Gearing draws from lived experience in a boxing program for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, shaping a crime-inflected narrative that examines sibling bonds, trauma and justice. 

And Where Are All The Gods?
Christian Cavallo

Christian Cavallo’s And Where Are All The Gods? by Monroe Livesey reimagines queer power structures through a contemporary lens, interrogating ambition, legacy and the commodification of identity in a dinner-party drama set on the eve of a theatre premiere. 

Gold Mountain Wives
Bingyao Liu

Bingyao Liu’s Gold Mountain Wives the Musical by Jun Bin Lee explores the hidden histories of Chinese women in Geelong during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, combining original composition, archival research and live traditional instrumentation to foreground migration and belonging. 

Mother Grid
Leah Baulch

Leah Baulch’s Mother Grid is a crime-inflected text-based theatre work set within a digital parenting app that becomes a site of surveillance, misinformation and community fracture across the Geelong region. 

The Water Done Gone
James Jackson

James Jackson’s The Water Done Gone by Bloomshed reimagines the Murray–Darling Basin as an epic of environmental collapse and political satire, tracing the contested histories of water, land and survival across regional Australia. 

The Charm Campaign
Chi Vu

Chi Vu’s The Charm Campaign repositions early Chinese-Australian history through the lens of reality television, blending historical research with contemporary cultural forms to explore identity performance, immigration and storytelling.

through her body backwards and into mine
Karlia May Cook

Karlia May Cook’s through her body backwards and into mine is a contemporary dance work grounded in matrilineal Indigenous histories, weaving movement, archival material and sound into an embodied exploration of grief, sovereignty and ancestral memory.