Izabella
Nantsou
I am a researcher, educator, and raconteur residing on Gadigal and Bidjigal Country in Sydney, Australia.
Born into a family of storytellers — my father a playwright, my mother a poet, and my grandparents political refugees — I grew up surrounded by epic tales, performance, and passionate debates around the dinner table. That early immersion in art and politics shaped my belief that art isn’t just expressive, but deeply political, entangled with systems of power, economic structures, and historical change. That idea sits at the core of my research.
My research focuses on labour, policy, and the arts, particularly the role of cultural subsidy in the organisation of the arts sector and how funding and policy are embodied in artistic practice. I’m interested in how artists navigate the shifting conditions of creative labour and what these shifts reveal about public value, political priorities, and the structural pressures shaping cultural work in Australia.
I hold a PhD from the University of Sydney, where my doctoral thesis studied Art and Working Life — an Australian arts program that brought trade unions into partnership with community artists during a period of major cultural and industrial transformation throughout the 1980s. That project now forms the basis of my first book, which uses Art and Working Life as a lens to explore how artistic labour, public policy, and class politics converged, and collapsed, with the rise of neoliberalism.
Beyond research, I teach at The University of Sydney and the National Institute of Dramatic Arts, where my students learn critical thinking through creative practice.
As a human being, I love theatre, Australian political biographies, old photos of familiar places, ocean swimming, street libraries, Talking Heads, stone fruit season, the Good Weekend quiz, mid-century modern design, and 80s sci-fi (especially Robocop).
On this site, you’ll find a little about me, my research, current projects, publications, and teaching. Welcome!