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 carey is a writer, performance maker and outdoor arts practitioner based in the Blue Mountains, NSW. Her artistic work centres on connective collaborative practice, and concepts of nature connection, grief/loss and social change.
Her most significant work to date is Beneath the Surface (2023), a floating, site-responsive performance and installation by canoe in Kangaroo Valley. She received a Festivals Australia Grant to co-produce the work with Julie Henninger, co-writing, co-directing and performing in the piece.
Other recent collaborations include MAGNIFY! An Immersive Insect World (2024), Weaving Wild Wonder (2021), Wild Ground: Bushfire Recovery Storytelling Project (2020) and The Nature of Motherhood: Sit Spot Writing (2018).
Through her business, Wild Ground Creative Adventures, Dan has spent over a decade creating nature immersion programs and creative projects for children and adults. Her work draws on creative practice, forest schooling, nature play and social ecology, and is grounded in trauma-informed and neuro-affirming practice.
She holds a Music Degree and a Master of Teaching.