What's Your Worth Series 2 - Creative Industries Lights Out!!

Christina Gerakiteys is a creativity and innovation catalyst. Her purpose is to ignite hearts and minds to what is possibility.

With a strong communication background, she passionately writes and presents business development and innovation programs and workshops. She is also a sought-after facilitator for corporate events and conferences.

Christina is founder of UtopiaX, a creativity and innovation focused business, writes for several publications and speaks regularly on radio about business development, creativity and innovation. She is a contributor to the award winning Front-End Innovation blog.

Her depth of knowledge and engaging style has made her a popular presenter at major conferences including SingularityU Australia Summit, Vivid Ideas and Creative Innovation.

Christina is an active supporter and advocate for several innovation committees, produces the annual Hunter Innovation Festival, and lectures in business, innovation and entrepreneurship.

A self-confessed lifelong learner, she is a recent graduate of the Executive Program at Singularity University (Cuperitno, Silicon Valley) and is currently undertaking doctorate studies in creativity and innovation.

In 2018, Christina will publish her second book Celebrating Utopia – One Failure at a Time. This follows the publication of her first published work, Can’t Talk Now I’m on the Phone.

Monica Davidson is an award-winning expert on the creative industries, who began her creative life as a freelance journalist and filmmaker before starting a film production company in the early '90s. Her experience highlighted how desperately unprepared creative people can be for a life of entrepreneurship. Monica decided to use her expertise to help other creative practitioners develop and improve their business skills, and now she works with individual practitioners and larger organisations as a business advisor, strategic consultant and workshop facilitator.

In 2015 Monica was named as one of the Westpac 100 Women of Influence for her work in the creative industries.

Kate Richards is the Academic Course Advisor for the Master of Creative Industries at Western Sydney University. The degree has served dozens of young, mid- and later career professionals across the creative industries since 2009 (when it started as the Master of Convergent Media). Candidates have come from advertising, marketing, broadcast, journalism, music, visual arts, architecture, design, professional communications, etc. The degree has a systemic focus on design thinking and creative ideation, UX, appropriate technology and innovative research methods. It fosters professional development by targeting industry orientations to strategic communications, innovation, entrepreneurship and new models and methods for leadership, management and teamwork.

Kate is the leader of Western’s Experiential and Immersive Research Lab, which consults externally and internally on media projects. Kate majored in film for her BA Comms. at UTS, she has an MFA with first class honours in electronic art from UNSW CoFA and is undertaking a PhD in audience affect and experience in new media art installations. Working with media since her late teens – when she co-founded the Sydney Super 8 Festival – Kate has applied her versatile skillset and creativity to most media formats, including interactive multi-channel video and CGI installations, software development, XR, databases, video walls and live interactive performance.

Her solo and collaborative electronic artworks have shown at ACMI, The Performance Space at Carriageworks, Blake Prize Director’s Cut, Australian Centre for Photography, Video Brasil, ISEA Sydney and Helsinki, Experimenta, AGNSW, Centre for Contemporary Photography Melb. and Sydney Opera House amongst others. Kate has devised multimedia for theatre companies Stalker and Urban Theatre Projects and has produced multimedia projects for a variety of architectural and museum clients including Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, The Justice and Police Museum, The Museum of Sydney, Sydney Olympic Park Authority, Landini Associates, Otto Cserhalmi Architects

Brian Daly is an award-winning creative director, composer, songwriter, director, writer, musician and one-time Red Faces contestant with over 25 years’ experience in the creative industries.

After completing his creative arts degree at Wollongong University, Brian worked as a gigging musician, sound engineer, producer, theatre writer/director and a wandering minstrel at Old Sydney Town before falling unexpectedly into the world of advertising.

For 20 years he held leading creative roles in traditional advertising agencies, including nine years as group creative director at Enigma — the largest regionally-based agency in Australia, before setting up his creative consultancy, The Proverbials, in 2015.

Jo  Pretyman  is a social  impact specialist who  believes in the power  of creativity to create social  and economic change. With 15 years experience across philanthropy, creative industries and education innovation, Jo works to offer new ways of businesses integrating their CSR and business strategies, bridging sustainability with commercial outcomes. 

Jo is is currently working as the Product Director at innovation design consultancy, Tricky Jigsaw and is the Founder of NGO I-Manifest, empowering youth with education and career pathways into the creative industries. Jo also sits on the Advisory Board of ARROW collective and is Chair of the Fashion Impact category of the Good Design Australia Awards.

Christopher Saunders is an enabler and a social change initiator. He was creative producer for fifteen years with Big hART and has been with Renew Newcastle for six years. Renew Newcastle has enabled creative enterprises to flourish and bring life back to a desolate cityscape as well as inform urban development decision-making.

Christopher’s “hands on” collaborative approach has helped deliver some extraordinary benefits for whole communities. These include the restoration of an arthouse cinema in Newcastle; international recognition for the Northcott public housing estate in Sydney; and a national voice for farming families.