About
Dan and Julie collaborate using immersive performance, outdoor adventure, poetry, found materials, weaving and photography to explore connective practice and ecological relationships. Their quirky and playful work focuses on allowing the unseen to be seen.
Julie-Ann Henninger
Julie is an arts practitioner with over ten years of experience facilitating interdisciplinary learning and creating spaces. She specialises in collaborative ecological art and poetry.
Recent appointments include Creative Director of Beneath the Surface with Danielle Carey, Artist in Residence at Wild Ground Creative Adventures, and Ecological Arts Facilitator for STEAMworks Science Hub. She completed a Bachelor of Liberal Studies (Arts) with distinction in 2020.
Julie is an active exhibiting artist with a recent focus on land based community projects across creative disciplines in both solo and collaborative works. Twice recipient of the NCW Beadle prize for Botany, she was an overall Winner of the 30in30 Red Room Poetry Prize in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Poem Forest Prize in 2021.
Julie fuses her passions for the intricate ecological world and collaborative connective practice in her creative work. With ancestry from The Isle of Man, England and Germany, she lives in unceded Darug and Gundungurra Country and would like to pay her respects to the Elders past and present.
Dan Eleni Carey
Dan Eleni is a writer, teacher and arts practitioner. Her artistic work centres on connective collaborative practice, and concepts of nature connection, grief/loss and social change.
For the past 20 years, she has managed and implemented a variety of art projects, events, and community spaces and worked as a freelance writer, editor and arts practitioner. She has also worked as an educator in a variety of contexts in the Arts, primary school education and outdoor education industries.
Since 2014, she has developed and implemented a wide variety of collaborative art projects and nature-based education programs to local Blue Mountains and Sydney families through her local business, Wild Ground Creative Adventures.
In 2023, she was a recipient of the Federal Government’s Festival Australia Grant, working as Creative Director with Julie for Beneath The Surface – a floating art installation and immersive performance adventure by canoe.
Other recent art projects have seen Dan in collaboration with other local Blue Mountains artists alongside Wild Ground programs and her own creative practices, including Wild Ground Artist residency (2018-2023), Weaving Wild Wonder (2021), Bushfire Recovery Storytelling project (2020), 30-day Sit Spot project and nature writings: Killawarra: Motherhood in nature (2018).