THEA MAI BAUMANN, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER AND MEDIA ARTIST

Thea Mai Baumann is a curator, producer, and media artist. She has been involved in conceiving and delivering programs, exhibitions, and symposia informed by cross-cultural and transnational relationships, networked and digital culture, nomadic and mobile forms of curatorship, and contemporary art emerging from the Asia-Pacific region.

Between 2004-2006, Baumann was Special Projects Officer/Producer for MAAP: Multimedia Art Asia Pacific - the Asia-Pacific's pre-eminent media arts festival.
In 2004 she co-curated and coordinated Zero Gravity, a live audio-visual broadcast between the Singapore Art Museum and Brisbane's The Block.
In 2006 and 2007, she was awarded an Emerging Producer In Community through the Australia Council for the Arts for her work fusing new media and CCD practice.
In 2006, she curated, directed, and produced Manhua Wonderlands - a rhizomic cross-platform and multi-locational media arts initiative that linked up over 330 contemporary art spaces, libraries, galleries, museums, pearltea cafes, video stores, karaoke clubs, and Japanese purikura stickerbooths in a simultaneous viewing experience. Manhua Wonderlands explored digital and virtual (sub)culture(s) and was produced and presented as part of MAAP's Out of the Internet Festival.

In 2007, Baumann completed an Asialink residency with the pioneering Artist-Led Initiative a little blah blah in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where she curated, directed, and produced The Last Vestige - a floating junk boat art experience and intervention on the Mekong River, and a series of satellite screenings in Saigonese nightclubs of Australian video art. The Last Vestige explored and instigated contemporary curatorial models related to theories of the Temporary Autonomous Zone and piracy.

Between 2007 - 2008, Baumann lived in Beijing where she was awarded a Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Fellowship to research Asian contemporary art and performance, and create curatorial networks with China's arts community.

In 2010, Baumann sat on Next Wave's Curatorial Advisory Committee for the 2010 Festival No Risk Too Great. She was also involved as a curator of new media works presented as part of Next Wave's key note projects Sports Club 1: Commitment and Sweat = My Personal Best presented at the George Knott Athletic Track, and Sports Club 2: The Arena presented at the MCG.

Baumann currently sits on the Steering Committee for Freeplay - Independent Games Festival (2005/2010), where she is involved in curating artists working with games technology.