Artist Development Program

Proposal Writing

Zoe Theodore

Join us on Saturday, the 6th of June, from 2—4 pm, for a workshop on proposal writing from Zoe Theodore.

This 3-hour workshop at Firstdraft explores application writing as a creative and critical practice rather than a bureaucratic exercise. Designed for emerging artists applying for open calls, funding, residencies, and professional opportunities, the session focuses on analysing institutional language, responding to selection criteria in plain language, and building a personal lexicon of practice to draw from across applications.

Beginning with building budgets rather than concepts, participants will use project costs, labour, materials, and logistics as a way to clarify what a project actually is before translating it into proposal language. Through spoken exercises, collaborative reading, and playful writing methods including forms of cento poetry, participants will experiment with how application language is constructed, borrowed, and repeated, while exploring ways to both use and unsettle institutional language for their own ends.

Participants are asked to bring an artist statement, project description, or draft application for group discussion and feedback. The workshop also reflects on the limitations of relying on AI-generated text, encouraging participants to develop language grounded in their own thinking, speech patterns, and working processes.

ZOE THEODORE is a curator and arts writer working on Gadigal Country. She is currently Curator, Programs at Artspace, Sydney.

Zoe regularly works directly with artists to realise new commissions, exhibitions and public programs for museums, galleries and organisations including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the Immigration Museum, Melbourne, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, BUS Projects, and the Biennale of Sydney. She was the Project Coordinator and Associate Researcher on the ARC-supported Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum project from 2021-2024.

She is a current PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales and previously held roles at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, MoMA PS1, New York, and was Co-Director of Firstdraft, Sydney (2022–24).

Alongside her curatorial practice, Zoe has contributed writing to un Magazine, Runway Journal, Artist Profile, and Art & Australia, as well as to publications by the National Gallery of Victoria and Monash University Museum of Art.

(Note: This workshop may take place in Gallery 1 which is accessed through a set of stairs.)