In a time of planetary crisis, a storyteller from Ait Koedal and Samu bloodlines and English heritage moves between dimensions: salt water and steel cities, flesh and pixels, myth and motion capture.
Practice
Ancestral knowledge, emergent technologies
Margaret J Harvey is an artist-researcher working at the intersection of ancestral knowledge and emergent technologies. Her practice is speculative in its methodology but grounded in living ancestral cosmologies. She builds worlds where bloodline epistemologies meet digital systems, where story moves through the body as data, and where Indigenous futures refuse nostalgia and embrace the strange.
She is the co-founder of Jo Ze spArks, an independent producing company working across performance, documentary and hybrid forms.
"World-holding: the ways ancestral worlds continue through bodies and stories across place and time."
Her practice begins with the diasporic body — not as a vessel carrying a world left behind, but as a living site where land–sea–sky, memory, knowledge and relation continue to move. Attentive to the sovereignty of the Country that hosts her, performance becomes a place where worlds meet, transform and continue.
The Story She Carries
Live transmission, not archive
For over a decade, she has carried a myth gifted by Awa Walter Waia from her Ait Koedal clan. The story was not waiting to be found. It was already moving.
This is not archival practice. It is live transmission. The story moves through memory, climate displacement, motherhood, grief, Indigenous cosmology and the body. It changes in encounter. It asks something of the person carrying it.
Now the myth enters motion capture and digital space. Story becomes data-stream. The body becomes algorithm. Saibaian worldview enters the machine. This is not preservation. It is transmutation.
Story-Body
Margaret's primary research protocol. The body is not a vessel for knowledge — the body knows. Knowledge lives in breath, bone, sensation, gesture and the small movements between heartbeats. Through Story-body, corporeal practice becomes a rigorous mode of inquiry: a way of listening for what language cannot yet hold. The diasporic body becomes a site of continuance — carrying memory, cosmology and relation across place and time.
Caring for Story
Margaret's relational and ethical methodology. Story is not content — it is one of the ways knowledge is carried, renewed and brought into relationship across generations. To carry a story is to enter into relation with it: its genealogy, obligations, permissions and movement through time. Relational accountability lives inside every decision. The question is not only what a story means, but what it asks of us.
Together, Story-body and Caring for Story enable what she calls world-holding: a practice through which ancestral worlds continue to move through bodies, relations and emergent forms — aesthetic worlds that refuse the false choice between tradition and technology, positioning Indigenous peoples not as subjects of the future but as its architects.
Works
Transmutation through technology
Grounded always in bloodline, cultural relation and the body. Technology does not lead the work. Story does.
BAMI
2021
Hybrid video installation, Queensland Museum · with Desmond Connellan & Senior Cultural Knowledge Custodian Jeffrey Aniba Waia
Responding to climate change and rising seas in Zenadh Kes, the work moves through Saibaian cosmology, intergenerational storytelling and the Mekai tree planted to mark the encroaching waters. Moving image, performance presence and Elders' storytelling in language converge as technologies of continuance. The ancestors do not remain in the archive — they move through pixels to speak directly to their descendants.
Woer Wayepa — The Water is Rising
2018
Live performance, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair · with Awa Jeff Aniba Waia · commissioned by the Lowitja Institute's Torres Strait Researchers' Community of Practice
Performance, video, dance, movement and language operate as technologies of intergenerational knowledge transmission in response to rising seas and climate change in Zenadh Kes. Through this collision, the work opens speculative terrains of Indigenous futurism and science fiction inseparable from Saibai cosmology, cultural authority and community — the body becomes a portal where ancestral knowledge and speculative futures meet and rewild one another.
My Lover's Bones
2014
Performance, inspired by Cameron Costello's poem and short film (directed by Margaret J Harvey)
Brings the ancestral figure of Jargon — the bunyip of the Quandamooka people — into the contemporary city, staging a collision between ancestral presence and urban life, where the contained breaks free.
Traces the evolution of Saibai Island dance from the arrival of the London Missionary Society in the late nineteenth century to the present — attending to how dance has held, transformed and carried Saibai knowledge through generations of pressure: a living archive of resistance, adaptation and cultural continuance held in the body.
Kiwirrkurra
NITV
Documentary, NITV
Kiwirrkurra is the most remote community in Australia, falling in the cracks for services between the WA and NT governments. This documentary looks at interactions between Elders and youth as they fight to keep their culture and language strong while living within a dominant world culture.
Teaching
Relation, not instruction
Margaret J Harvey is Senior Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her teaching centres care, accountability and plurality as intellectual practices.
Her pedagogy draws from Caring for Story and Story-body, framing theory as something lived and embodied. Students are encouraged to build knowledge through dialogue, collaboration and self-awareness rather than mastery, and to recognise their own voices, experiences and questions as sites of intellectual inquiry.
Margaret has co-facilitated with Force Majeure and taught filmmaking in the Torres Strait and refugee communities in Melbourne. She also mentors postgraduate researchers whose work emerges from their own genealogies, communities and creative lineages. For her, teaching is not instruction but relation — a practice of learning with, not from.
The Architecture
Research & recognition
Education
PhD, Theatre Performance — Monash University, 2021, conducted in close collaboration with Ait Koedal custodians and elders
Current Positions
Senior Lecturer, English & Theatre Studies, University of Melbourne
McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2022–2025
Associate Artist, Force Majeure, 2024–2026
Selected Writing
Griffith Review
Australasian Drama Studies
Bloomsbury
Brill
Research Presentations
New York · Seoul · Los Angeles — ecological performance and Indigenous digital futures
Institutional Experience
Sydney Theatre Company
Melbourne Theatre Company
Queensland Theatre
Director of fourteen documentaries for NITV
Extensive career as an actor
Awards & Support
Creative Australia Fellowship
Lowitja Institute Scholarship
Uncle Bob Maza Award
AFI Award — Nominee, Best Supporting Actress
Sydney Theatre Critics Award — Nominee
Leadership & Service
National Advisory Panel member, ARC-funded Culture for Climate project (P+ERL)
Co-convenor, IFTR 2026, Naarm — international gathering of 600+ theatre and performance scholars and artists
Initiator & Co-convenor, First Nations Circle — the first Indigenous gathering in the Federation's history