A-F 2020

Alanna Bastin-Byrne has over 18 years’ experience in Marketing, Communications and Community Development leadership in the UK and Australia. Alanna’s experience spans a wide range of industries including Health, Arts, Events, Education, Social Housing and Tourism.

The diversity of Alanna’s leadership experience has been instrumental in educating business owners, budget owners and the female economy on how their purchasing decisions can create gender equality. Alanna is a 2020 finalist in the Queensland Telstra Business Women’s Awards.

Alanna was born on the land of the Giabal people at Toowoomba, and now lives and works on Bundjalung Country.

Anna Guenther is the co-founder and Chief Bubble Blower of PledgeMe, a crowdfunding platform that has raised $50million for over 1,400 successful community, creative and entrepreneurial campaigns. PledgeMe was the first licenced equity crowdfunding platform in New Zealand in 2014, and one of the first in Australia.

Anna is currently the only woman leading an equity crowdfunding platform in Australia and New Zealand, and possibly, sadly, the world. Over 60% of their successful campaigns have female founders, which when compared to the industry norm of 3% for venture capital, is pretty special.

Anna has also worked for the New Zealand Government, MIT and Harvard, and completed her Masters in Entrepreneurship with a focus on crowdfunding. She has spoken for the World Economic Development Forum, TEDx, and at hundreds of events around the world on crowdfunding, feminism, and social enterprise.

David Leser is a multi-award winning journalist who has worked in Australia, North America, the Middle East, Europe and Asia for the past 40 years. He has worked as a feature writer for the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, HQ magazine, the Bulletin, Good Weekend, the Australian Women’s Weekly, Italian and German Vanity Fair, Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

He has also worked as a Washington D.C, Jerusalem and Paris-based correspondent.

David is the author of 7 books, including a memoir: To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father which was shortlisted for the 2015 National Biography Award. He is also editor of Paul Kelly: The Essays (2012), as well as Executive Producer of the award-winning Australian documentary Paul Kelly: Stories of Me.

Born in Montreal, David is a Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA – Ethics of Memoir) who also works as a public interviewer, guest lecturer, writing mentor, and speech writer.

David’s new book Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing – about gender relations in the age of #MeToo – was published by Allen & Unwin on August 5, 2019.

Based in Sydney, he has two daughters, Jordan, a singer-songwriter, and Hannah, a photographer.

Elise Stephenson is a 28-year-old award-winning social entrepreneur and researcher at Griffith University, Australia. Co-founder of queer feminist creative agency, Social Good Outpost, she is passionate about creating future-proof societies.

Elise is curator of the Youth Entrepreneurs & Leaders Speaker Series, bringing Australian social change to global audiences across topics such as domestic violence, climate change and environmental sustainability, gender equality, LGBTI+ inclusion, and more.

Elise is recognised as one of 25 ‘Young Women to Watch’ in international affairs, one of Boston Consulting Group’s ‘30 Under 30 LGBTI+ Role Models’, and was awarded a United Nations Australia Association award for her pioneering work in LGBTI+ domestic violence prevention.

Anisa is a nationally recognised spoken word poet, play writer, educator and published author.

She is the 2016 Queensland Poetry slam champion and runner up for the Australian poetry slam championships. In 2017 she published her first book Melanin Garden and won the XYZ Innovation in Spoken Word Prize. She has performed at the Sydney Opera House, Splendour in the Grass, Queensland Poetry festival, WOW (Women of the World) Australia and toured the country sharing stories of courage.

Anisa is also the co-founder of the arts collective Voices of Colour which creates a space for migrant, refugee and first nations artists to share their work. In 2018 she wrote, directed and starred in the play "The Grass is dead on the Other side" at Brisbane Powerhouse. In 2019 she wrote and acted in the Spoken Word theatre show How to spell love that was showcased at the Judith Wright Centre.

She has facilitated poetry workshops in schools and universities such as Brisbane Boys Grammar State high school and Queensland University of Technology.

Bri Lee is a writer and editor whose work has been published in The Monthly, Harper's Bazaar Australia, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The Guardian, Griffith Review, i-D, VAULT Art Magazine, and elsewhere. She regularly appears on The Drum on ABC TV, various ABC Radio National programs, and often gives talks on writing, law, feminism, fashion, pop culture, and art. As the Founding Editor of the quarterly print periodical Hot Chicks with Big Brains, Bri commissioned and published diverse non-fiction about women and their work from 2015 to 2018.

Her first book, Eggshell Skull, was published by Allen & Unwin in June 2018. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards in non-fiction, winning the 2019 People's Choice Award, and also won the 2018 People's Choice at the Nib Awards for research in writing, and the 2019 ABIA for Biography of the Year. Eggshell Skull has also been shortlisted for the 2019 Indie Book Awards and longlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize.

In 2016 Bri was the recipient of the inaugural Kat Muscat Fellowship, and in 2017 was one of Griffith Review's Queensland writing fellows. Her latest work, Beauty – published in November 2019 - is a powerful meditation on beauty and body image.

Cissy has over twenty years’ experience working on capital and private equity raising. She is a former M&A "in house expert" for three major firms. Her largest private capital raise was for $20million. She is an IPO Consultant and works on all aspects of IPO, due diligence for funding and the largest IPO capital raise she has managed was for $5billion.

Cissy is the Founder of the APAC Women's Mentoring Circle a mentoring body providing support to women professionals and entrepreneurs predominantly of Asian descent. The group has over 600 plus professionals from 16 different countries. Cissy also founded the Australia to China Gateway to support companies seeking funding to support expansion into China.

Beth Mohle is the Secretary of the Queensland Nurses and Midwives’ Union, the largest union in Queensland. She is Senior Vice President of the Queensland Council of Unions.

After completing a Bachelor of Arts at Griffith University, Beth followed the family tradition of nursing, training at the Royal Brisbane Hospital before becoming an Organiser at the QNU. She held various union roles before being elected Assistant Secretary in 2007 and Secretary in 2011.

Beth is currently a board member of QSuper and was previously a board member and Chair of HESTA. She is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees (AIST) and was named AISTs Trustee of the year in 2008.