About Us

Who we are

Founded in 2001, Currency House Inc. is a non-profit association open to all practitioners and supporters of the Australian performing arts, including theatre, film, television, music, and dance.

Our aim is to stimulate, enrich, and advance the quality and enjoyment of the Australian performing arts by:

• being a continually expanding resource centre
• functioning as an accessible and vigorous forum and think-tank
• advocating and advancing the status and standards of the Australian performing arts in the media and with the public at large.

What we do

Currency House:

• meets regularly for background briefings and forums
• seeks ways to activate our life as performing artists
• encourages the exploration of theory and practice
• commissions research to support debate on issues of professional concern
• publishes works of record on the performing arts in Australia.

Our Board

Katharine Brisbane, AM, was co-founder in 1971 of Currency Press, the performing arts publishers; and founder in 2001 of Currency House Inc. a non-profit association to assert the value of the performing arts in public life. She was a theatre critic for 21 years, notably national critic of the Australian 1967–74 during a time of radical change; and has written widely on the history of Australian theatre.

John Golder is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Theatre in the University of New South Wales. His special research interests are in theatre architecture and stagecraft in 17th century France, the reception of Shakespeare in France and Australia from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and translations of 17th- and 18th-century French playtexts for the English stage.

Steve Lawrence is Founder and of WorkVentures Ltd, an entrepreneurial non-profit organisation based in Sydney that provides employment, training and job placement services to unemployed people and local economic development services in socially excluded communities. Steve has qualifications in social work and management and lectures regularly on social enterprise, local economic development and non-profit management.  In 2004 Steve received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Social Enterprise for NSW & ACT. In 2005 WorkVentures and Microsoft won the Prime Minister’s Community Business Partnership Longevity Award for its 20-year collaboration to bring IT resources and skills to disadvantaged people.

Sara Leonardi is an executive in Strategy & Change at IBM Global Business Services. She began her career in Slicon Valley, California, working for the industry leaders and has been a consultant to a large variety of public and private enterprises, including the Commonwealth Bank, Futuris Automotive, William Angliss Institute of  TAFE, Woolworths, Coles Myer, DHL, EnergyAustralia, BAXGlobal, NSW Department of Games & Racing, NSW DEST, St. George Bank, Westpac, Perpetual Trustees, Amcor, Telstra, Optus, Santos, ConnXion, Colonial State Bank, AMP, Deltanet and the Australian Tax Office. She has a BA in Economics from San Diego State University and is a SIIA Certified Software Manager.

Harriet Parsons is a Melbourne artist with an interest in cultural policy and strategies for supporting the creative lives of artists. She is a graduate of Sydney University in Chinese and English and from Sydney College of the Arts in painting. She worked for a decade in theatre administration and as an editor for Currency Press. She moved to Melbourne in 1999 where she has exhibited at the Gertrude Street Galleries, the Melbourne Art Fair, the National Gallery of Victoria and Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai. Since 2004 she has been developing a guide to the factors contributing to financial insecurity among artists and The Artist’s Money Manager, a cashflow and budgeting program that helps artists to budget ahead, calculate artist fees, ‘day job’ rates of pay and tax due.

Martin Portus is Senior Policy Advisor to the Mayor of Parramatta.  From 1989-2000 he was an ABC TV and Radio National arts broadcaster and producer. He was the presenter of Arts National, presenter of Performance (a performing arts specialist program), and the producer/presenter of Arts Today. He has worked as a theatre critic for over twenty years. He trained at NIDA, holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Adelaide (Major Politics) and a Diploma of International Journalism from City University, London. He is currently a board member of the Sydney Star Observer and Currency Press.

John Wardle is a working musician, a member of the Music Council of Australia (MCA), a federal delegate for the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) and consultant to the Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA) on the regulation of entertainment venues in Australia.
John played a key role in the overhaul of NSW Liquor laws and Place of Public Entertainment (PoPE) regulations for live entertainment in NSW, and is the strategist behind the “Raise the Bar” campaign.

Dr Mark Williams is a senior adviser with jdrlegal pty ltd with offices in Melbourne and Los Angeles. He has over twenty-five years experience in arts, entertainment and information technology, postgraduate qualifications in intellectual property law and a doctorate on seventeenth-century dramaturgy. He was a director of the visual arts copyright collecting society VISCOPY from 2000 to 2004 and is a panel member of the Arts Law Centre of Australia. From the introduction of moral rights legislation in 1998 to the present, Mark has successfully lobbied government for the protection of the interests of Australian visual artists, particularly indigenous artists and the balance between private rights and public interest. He has been a regular contributor and occasional presenter on community radio PBS-FM and is President of the Green Room Awards for excellence in live performing arts.

Currency House Annual Reports

Annual Report for 2007, prepared by Katharine Brisbane.
Annual Report for 2006, prepared by Katharine Brisbane.
Annual Report for 2005, prepared by Katharine Brisbane.
Annual Report for 2004, prepared by Katharine Brisbane
Annual Report for 2003, prepared by Katharine Brisbane.