Our Instructors

Charlotte has illustrated and written children's books published by Penguin, Pan Macmillan, Allen & Unwin and Scholastic. Her work includes A Really Super Hero, This Girl, That Girl, and Moth in a Fancy Cardigan. She builds worlds that hold stories within stories, working across traditional and digital media.

She teaches the way she works: look closely, draw what's actually there, then make it yours.

Andrew studied Visual Communication, majoring in Photography. Twenty years on, he's worked as a designer, photographer and gallery director, running No Vacancy Gallery and later directing YAVA. He built Assembly because the system around young people kept treating creativity as decoration instead of discipline.

He teaches the way he's worked: try, fail, try again. Back your ideas. Test them. Push through when it's not working yet. He's spent years making his own work and his own mistakes, and in the studio he works alongside you, showing you how to look, how to frame, how to decide what matters, then make it.

Valanga learned to drum in Limpopo, South Africa, from neighbours who were orators, healers and storytellers, carrying rhythms handed down for a thousand years. He has been playing and telling those stories in Australia since 1976. Author of Dumazi and the Yellow Lion, published by Scholastic. He plays djembe, dun dun, kalimba, marimba and shijororo, and several instruments he built himself.

Almost nobody gets taught rhythm by someone who learned it at its source.

Eugénie is a director and screenwriter. Since 2021 she has directed Neighbours, Australia's longest running serial drama. Her own films have screened at festivals here and overseas, with premieres at Flickerfest and Sitges. She is a neurodivergent filmmaker who writes honest, slightly off-kilter stories and complicated characters.

Most young people have watched thousands of hours of television. Almost none have met someone who makes it.

Josh is a cinematographer. He won the NFSA and Australian Cinematographers Society John Leake OAM Award for an emerging cinematographer in 2015, and took ACS Gold in Victoria and Tasmania the year before for Twenty Forty Three. He has shot short films and commercials since.

Where the camera sits, and what the light falls on, is a decision. Most people never learn that it was a decision at all.

Ben runs Ben Lance Architects. His Mount Macedon House was named one of the best houses of 2024 by Domus, and has been published by ArchDaily, Archello and Memo Review. His practice covers houses at Mount Martha, St Kilda East, Rye and Aireys Inlet.

Ben designed the Assembly studio. He knows the room better than anyone.

David works under his own name and as Ghostpatrol. His practice moves between studio work, site specific installation, commissioned murals and commercial design. His work has been exhibited at and acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Museum and the Parliament House Art Collection. Born in Hobart, based in Naarm.

He describes his own approach as working like a child. That is not modesty. That is the method.

Hiroyasu was born in Yokohama and moved to Melbourne in 2003. With almost no English, he used skateboarding and graffiti to learn the city. He works as TWOONE on large scale murals, and across painting, sculpture, installation, performance and sound. His work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and the City of Yarra, and he has painted walls in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland and Germany.

He learned to make things before he could explain them. Most young people are asked to do it the other way around.

Carla is an artist and illustrator based in Naarm. She works across drawing, digital illustration, sculpture, installation, murals and publications, built on clean lines, geometric shapes and strong colour. She studied design and communication at the University of the Sunshine Coast and is represented by The Jacky Winter Group in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Her work looks simple. Simple is the hardest thing to make.

Jeremy is an illustrator and storyboard artist. He illustrates Anh Do's Ninja Kid, thirteen books for Scholastic Australia. He was the original illustrator on Wolf Girl, and he drew Kung Fu Roo, Anh Do's first graphic novel, in full colour for Allen & Unwin. He studied Creative Advertising at RMIT and has worked in storyboards for film, including End of Town for Renegade Films.

Most young people have already read his work. Almost none of them know his name.

Sai describes himself as a maker of murals, objects, buildings and ideas. His work moves between building design, ceramics, mural painting and teaching, which he treats as different ways of exploring the same thing rather than separate disciplines. Recent projects include the Federal Mills silo, the Marigolds and Peacock murals, the Tailfeather store, and a house at Barwon Heads.

He says the process of making matters as much as the outcome. Most young people are only ever shown the outcome.

Bobby is a painter based in Naarm. He works in acrylic on panel and canvas, painting views and vantage points noticed on walks through his own neighbourhood, sun faded architecture and the overgrown foliage around it. He has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne since 2008, including at Backwoods Gallery, Lamington Drive and TDF Collect, and has shown in New York, London and Singapore. He grew up in the Dandenong Ranges.

He paints the street he walks down. Most young people are taught that the subjects worth making work about are somewhere else.

Evie was born in Ballarat in 1992 and studied Illustration at NMIT. She works in bold, expressive colour drawn from Fauvism, making paintings about how a place feels to stand in rather than how it looks. She has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne since 2015, shown work in Sydney, Perth, San Francisco and Rome, and taken residencies in Finland, Greece and Melbourne's west. She has been a finalist in the Len Fox Art Prize, the Waverley Woollahra Art Prize, the Greenway Art Prize and the Elaine Bermingham Watercolour Prize.

Colour is a decision about feeling, not accuracy. That is a hard thing to learn and almost nobody is taught it.

Yuko was born and raised in Japan and studied humanities at university in Tokyo. She learned English in Sydney before moving to Melbourne in 2019.

She knows what it is to say something correctly and still not be understood. In her own words, from those first years in Sydney: "I'm speaking English!"

English is unforgiving that way. Japanese is not. Get the sounds roughly right and people will follow you, which means a beginner can be understood long before they are fluent.

What actually catches people out is counting. Two books is ni-satsu. Two dogs is ni-hiki. Two drinks is ni-hai. Same number, three different words, and no way around learning them.

She teaches the language she grew up speaking, to people starting from nothing.

Hope studied Industrial Design at RMIT, graduating with Honours in 2015. For the past nine years she has designed architectural and decorative lighting for an Australian manufacturer, taking work from first sketch through to an object that gets made. She likes working with her hands and she likes learning how things are made. She treats designing as play: make it, get it wrong, collect the data, change something.

You don't have to be the best sketcher. You have to be able to get the idea across.