Creative Support Material: CultureLAB 2025
This page supports Honor Eastly’s application for CultureLAB 2025. The residency will support the development of a major new one-woman, genre-bending performance blending music, theatre, surreal comedy, and experimental film to interrogate systemic discrimination and the interstitial space of mental health disability. Using the real-time arc of deciding whether to have children as its narrative engine — and with CultureLAB and expert collaborators as the experimental technical playground — the project will integrate humour, absurdity, and lived-experience insight with cutting-edge digital experimentation.
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“TOTAL MAGIC”
- THE ATLANTIC
Photos in this support material are from the one-night-only experimental developmental presentation of No Feeling Is Final – Live, commissioned by RMIT for the finale of The Big Anxiety Festival 2022. The show was created bespoke for a 600-seat, sold-out crowd at The Capitol Theatre in Melbourne.
With support from Creative Victoria (2025–2026) and Science Gallery Melbourne (confirmed), and pending CultureLAB support, this new project will move into its next stage of development — building on the creative ambition and technical innovation of No Feeling Is Final – Live while charting new territory in form, content, and accessibility.
This work centres disability leadership — not just in its content, but in its development, process, and partnerships. The creative team includes multiple collaborators with lived experience, and this next phase deepens a commitment to access and trauma-informed practices across all aspects of production.
“A GROUNDBREAKING PERFORMANCE MEMOIR”
- PAULA TOAL
RMIT HEAD OF CULTURE
“Mental health explored like never before”
- The Financial Times
BUILDING ON CREATIVE EXCELLENCE
No Feeling Is Final – Live was an emotionally layered, artistically ambitious portrait of distress, survival, and the systems that shape both. Based on the internationally acclaimed ABC podcast of the same name, the live show wove memoir, sound, video, lighting, and performance into a distinctive theatrical language.
This CultureLAB project evolves that approach into an entirely new work — retaining the dark humour, hybrid form, and lived-experience insight while using new technologies and staging experiments to push the boundaries of how mental health disability is represented on stage.
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR THE ORIGINAL PODCAST SERIES
“Mental health explored like never before” - The Financial Times
“Something rare” - TIME Magazine
“Darkly funny” - The New York Times
“Something extraordinary” - The Atlantic
“Impressive, bruising and tender storytelling” - Benjamin Law
Named on “best podcast of the year” lists by The Atlantic, New York Times, TIME, and The Financial Times
Winner: International Third Coast Director’s Choice Award, widely regarded as the “Oscars for Podcasts”
Named by Apple Podcasts as a “Series Essential” in May 2025, the only Australian podcast to receive this award.
PLAY THE ORIGINAL PODCAST TRAILER
6mins
Click the image to open the player
2022 EXPERIMENTAL DEVELOPMENT SHOWING: PROVEN LIVE POTENTIAL
No Feeling Is Final – Live was an emotionally layered, artistically ambitious portrait of distress, survival, and the systems that shape both. Based on the internationally acclaimed ABC podcast of the same name, the live show wove memoir, sound, video, lighting, and performance into a distinctive theatrical language.
This CultureLAB project evolves that approach into an entirely new work — retaining the dark humour, hybrid form, and lived-experience insight while using new technologies and staging experiments to push the boundaries of how mental health disability is represented on stage.
Sold-out 600-seat venue (The Capitol)
Only sold-out event at The Big Anxiety Festival 2022
First full house at The Capitol Theatre since the pandemic
Over 650+ bespoke lighting, video, and audio cues
Backed by City of Melbourne, RMIT, and The Big Anxiety Festival
CROSS-SECTOR IMPACT
The original podcast has already been included as required listening in university courses across social work, counselling, and psychology. This new live iteration is backed by leading sector voices including:
"There is clear demand for this work in professional development settings." – Dr Tim Sharp, psychologist and keynote speaker
"I was transfixed by her performance... I hope this new version will be seen by many more Australians who need it." – Professor Patrick McGorry AO, mental health advocate and Former Australian of the Year
The project has potential to operate as a keynote performance or training tool across health, education, arts, and social service sectors.
STRONG INDUSTRY ENDORSEMENT FOR LIVE VERSION
“No Feeling is Final is beyond brave and a performance WA audiences deserve to experience."
- WA Museum Boola Bardip
"I was transfixed by her incredible performance… I hope this new version will be able to be seen by many more Australians who need it."
- Prof Patrick McGorry, Australian of the Year and Mental Health Advocate
"A groundbreaking performance memoir… welcoming The Capitol’s first sold-out audience since the pandemic”
- Paula Toal, Head of RMIT Culture
“The show was a testament to not only her incredible skills as a creator with a truly visionary approach, but to the entire creative team”
- Jacinta Di Mase, Literary Agent to Clementine Ford, Tracey Spicer, Jane Caro
“HONOR HAS AGAIN PUSHED THE ENVELOPE TO MAKE SOMETHING TRULY SPECIAL”
- JOEL WERNER
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
ABC AUDIO STUDIOS
“DARKLY FUNNY”
- THE NEW YORK TIMES
“I WAS TRANSFIXED BY HER INCREDIBLE PERFORMANCE… SHE IS A UNIQUE CREATIVE VOICE, SPEAKING TO THE VERY REAL HUMAN FALL-OUT OF A BROKEN SYSTEM…NOT JUST WITH BITING WIT, BUT REFRESHING HUMOUR, HONESTY AND INSIGHT”
- Prof Patrick McGorry
Australian of the Year and Mental Health Advocate
“Impressive, tender and bruising storytelling”
- Benjamin Law
CREATIVE TEAM
This project is both an opportunity to expand my own practice through collaboration, and to centre disability leadership in meaningful ways. A number of the key creatives involved in this stage of development are disabled artists. For privacy and consent reasons, their bios do not explicitly state this unless self-nominated. However, lived experience is a key consideration in assembling the team and informing the project’s direction.
HONOR EASTLY
CREATIVE LEAD
Honor Eastly is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and mental health advocate whose practice spans podcasting, performance, visual art, and installation. Trained at VCA in Fine Arts (2011), her work explores complex human experiences through innovative storytelling approaches that push beyond traditional artistic boundaries.
For the past decade, her work has increasingly focused on mental health, paralleling her advocacy in the sector. She is particularly interested in the challenge of adequately expressing difficult psychological experiences and the systemic failures in responding to them, especially experiences of chronic suicidality that defy simple solutions and often provoke risk-based responses instead of understanding.
Her artistic approach is deliberately varied, embracing a "form follows function" methodology where each project's medium emerges from what best serves its content. This has led to diverse works: from songs about taboo experiences performed in subjects' bedrooms (shown at National Gallery of Victoria and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art); to a photographic memoir documenting two years of crying at MOD. Gallery, UniSA (2021); to a digital campaign to reform mental health access that generated 8% of all submissions to Medicare.
In 2018, she won the ABC's $1M podcasting fund for No Feeling Is Final, an experimental memoir series exploring chronic suicidality that reached over 500,000 listeners and won the prestigious Third Coast Director's Choice Award. The series received international acclaim from The New York Times ("darkly funny"), The Atlantic ("total magic"), TIME ("something rare") and was recently named as a “Series Essential” by Apple Podcast, the first Australian podcast to receive this award.
Her style is resourceful and collaborative, bringing together experts across disciplines to realize projects in their optimal form. In 2022, Honor transformed her podcast into a multimedia developmental performance for The Big Anxiety Festival, selling out the 600-seat Capitol Theatre with a production featuring over 650 synchronized cues.
Alongside my creative work, Honor has shaped major mental health reforms, serving on the Expert Advisory Committee to the Royal Commission into Victoria's Mental Health System and co-founding The Big Feels Club (2017), a peer-led community that has reached over one million people and been recognized in the VicHealth Awards. In 2021, she was awarded the Australian Mental Health Prize, Australia's highest recognition for mental health advocacy.
www.honoreastly.com
Selected CV can be viewed here.
AHMARNYA PRICE - SCRIPT CONSULTANT / DRAMATURG
For over two decades Ahmarnya has exhibited and performed locally and internationally.
Her first multi-disciplinary solo performance RUMPUS debuted at Footscray Community Arts Centre in 2016 as part of the Festival of Live Art.
Since 2015 Ahmarnya has been a teaching artist at St Martins Youth Arts. From 2019 to 2020 she was Acting Artistic Associate at Back to Back Theatre, directing/ co-writing the animation series FIRST RESPONDERS (currently on ABC-iView).
She began developing THE SPLENDID ANOMALY at Arts House in 2018, traveling to Battersea Arts Centre and The University of Sussex/ACCA to undertake research residencies in 2019.
In 2021 Ahmarnya performed her short solo show RIDE ON TIME at La Mama Theatre’s War-Rak Festival. In 2023 she completed a Masters of Theatre (Writing) at VCA/Melbourne University. THE SPLENDID ANOMALY premiered at Arts House in August 2024 and was nominated for three Green Room awards.
CV can be viewed here.
ESTABLISHED THEATRE DIRECTOR - TBC
Creative Victoria funding will enable Honor and her creative team to work with an experienced theatre director for this creative development project. Currently in negotiations, to be confirmed by end of 2025.
ROB CURULLI
CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIST
Rob Curulli is a multidisciplinary creative technologist with an interest in sound, interactivity and process-based audiovisual work.
He worked with Honor to create and program the 650+ bespoke lighting, film and sound cues for the developmental presentation to a sold-out crowd of No Feeling Is Final Live show, made especially for The Capitol Theatre.
Recent work includes lighting design for Capitol Theatre's ceiling light system for Capitol Commissions and other RMIT events; microcontroller programming using LEDs and portable sound devices for Troy Innocent's Future Play Lab, developing creative technology solutions for public art installations; and music composition for the APHIDS production OH DEER!, which premiered at RISING festival 2023.
Rob has been performing and releasing music under a number of pseudonyms for over twenty years in a wide variety of genres, spanning ambient, avant-garde electronics, chiptune/retrotech, progressive metal, and others. Performance history includes appearances at Dark Mofo, Square Sounds Festival (Melbourne and Tokyo), and support/co-billing with artists such as Sunn O))), Clark, and Soichi Terada.
NIKKI CASTLE
FILMMAKER
Nikki Castle is a mid-career Melbourne-based director, with two broadcast credits on New Zealand television.
She worked with Honor to create the filmed-sequences for the No Feeling Is Final Live show.
Her short documentary film, Madness Made Me, found viral success and screened at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and New Zealand International Film Festival.
Nikki is building on over ten years as a short and long-form offline editor and story producer, with credits on Maori TV, Food TV Canada, Channel Seven Australia, ABC and SBS.
She has also self-produced and directed countless short documentaries across mental health and social welfare not-for-profits and NGO's. Clients include Vic Gov, Austin Health, Mind Australia and New Zealand's largest philanthropic trust, Foundation North.
GRAHAM PANTHER
MENTAL HEALTH ADVOCATE AND WRITER
Graham Panther is a mental health whizz who has set up award-winning, cutting edge services in New Zealand and Australia. He brings a wealth of expertise from the sector, as well as his own experience of profound crisis and distress.
In 2017, with Honor Eastly he set up The Big Feels Club, a peer-led, global peer support community.
Their work has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and TIME, as well as The Age and the Herald Sun. Since launching on a shoe-string, we’ve had well over a million downloads of their podcasts and articles, and countless messages from club members telling us that finding Big Feels was the first time they’ve felt truly understood in their mental health.
SCOUT BOXALL
OUTSIDE EYE / COMEDIC WRITING
Scout Boxall is a comedian and writer based in Melbourne. They began performing in 2018, making it to the Raw Comedy National Finals a few months into their solo career. They went on to receive the Best Emerging Artist Award (Melbourne Fringe 2019), Best Newcomer Nominee (Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2021), The Moosehead Award (2022), Best Comedy Award (Adelaide Fringe 2023), Judge's Pick Award (Melbourne Fringe 2024) and The Pinder Prize (MICF 2025). Scout has performed across the country and their latest solo stand up show "God's Favourite" enjoyed critical acclaimed sold out festival circuit in 2025. They have appeared on The Oxfam Gala and as a recurring role in Austin (ABC). Outside of performing, Scout teached at the VCA and writes for The Weekly With Charlie Pickering (ABC) and Crime Night! (ABC).
www.scoutboxall.com
PRODUCTION SUPPORT TEAM
FRASER ORFORD
INDEPENDENT THEATRE PRODUCER
Fraser has spent the past decade working across the commercial theatre sector in Australia, southeast Asia, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and most recently central & northern Africa and Europe.
He has held roles as Ambassador Theatre Group, GWB Entertainment, Michael Cassel Group, Opera Australia, The Everywhere Group and the National Theatre. His extensive experience spans theatre, musical theatre, immersive experiences and public art.
Notable theatre credits include Disney’s The Lion King, 1984, An American in Paris and People, Places & Things. Immersive productions have included Peter Rabbit’s Easter Adventure, Paddington’s Lo-Commotion, Peaky Blinders: The Rise, The Traitors: Live Experience, Peppa Pig’s Surprise Party and Come Alive! The Greatest Showman Circus Spectacular.
Fraser is currently General Manager of THE HERDS (www.theherds.org)
DR TIM SHARP (AKA DR HAPPY)
MENTAL HEALTH CONSULTANT
Dr. Tim Sharp (PhD) is one of Australia's leaders in Positive Psychology and mental health advocacy. With three degrees in psychology and extensive experience as both clinician and coach, he founded The Happiness Institute, Australia's first organization devoted to enhancing happiness in individuals and organizations.
He is a best-selling author of multiple books on mental health and wellbeing and will provide mental health consultation and script review during the creative development, ensuring both artistic integrity and psychological safety.
www.drhappy.com.au
