We’ve got some great guests lined up this year, and we’ll be announcing a few every Friday!
So, get ready for panels, interviews, workshops, and all sorts of online content!
- All
- Anime & Manga
- Artist
- Author / Writer
- Comics / Graphic Novels
- Community
- Cosplay
- Creative
- Diversity
- Film / TV
- Industry
- Tabletop Games
- Video Games
I_Artemis_I
I-Artemis-I (or Natalie) is a multi-award winning cosplayer. Known for her armour (mainly leatherwork), prop work and beards,
Natalie has won many awards for her cosplay skills, notably Madman National Cosplay Champion 2016, and selected as one of the World Cosplay Summit representatives for 2015 and again for 2020(1).
Dean Rankine
Comic Artist and Writer best known for his work on Simpsons Comics.
Contributed work to; "Rick and Morty" and "Invader Zim".
Illustrated "Timmy the Ticked-Off Pony and the Poo of Excitement" - written by Magda Szubanski.
Creator of the Ledger Award winning "Itty Bitty Bunnies in Rainbow Pixie Candy Land"
He's also one third of the Ogre's Basement Podcast.
Sare
This 'ward-winning cosplayer represented Australia at the Haneda International Anime Music Festival in Japan.
Guest judge at SMASH! Sydney Anime and Manga Show.
Coffs Harbour born and bred, now living in Sydney.
Excited to join her hometowns pop culture convention!
Giselle Rosman
Runs the Melbourne chapter of the International Game Developers’ Association (IGDA)
Previous Executive Producer of Global Game Jam & creator of LocomoJam.
Worked with the Game Developers’ Association of Australia and Hipster Whale.
Currently the Recruitment Agent for Big Ant Studios.
Multiple community award winner.
Founded the GDC Diversity Brunch, the MIGW Diversity lunch and the PAX Australia games accessibility panel.
Dan Golding
Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Swinburne University.
Host of Screen Sounds on ABC Classic. Author of 'Star Wars After Lucas', out now!
Created soundtracks to 'Untitled Goose Game' (Switch, PC, 2019), 'Push Me Pull You' (PS4, 2016), and 'The Haunted Island' (PC, 2018).
Presented What Is Music for ABC iView and Triple J with Linda Marigliano.
Award-winning writer with over 200 publications (ABC Arts, Crikey, Buzzfeed, Meanjin, Kotaku), and a video essayist with 1 million views on YouTube.
WETA Workshop
With seventeen manufacturing departments housed in one facility, Weta Workshop has the technology, techniques and talented crew to tackle almost any creative brief. For more than thirty years we’ve crafted hundreds of thousands of weapons; detailed miniatures; immersive attractions with Instagram-worthy centrepieces; bespoke specialty costumes; life-size animatronics; and more.
Distilling our creativity and craftmanship into bite-sized versions, we offer a huge and diverse range of high quality collectibles from film, gaming and beyond. All of our collectibles are prototyped here in the Workshop and are available online and in stores all over the world.
Check them out here: https://www.wetanz.com/
Cosplay Chris
Speciality Costumer based in Sydney who specialises in mostly superhero costumes and tutorials on YouTube!
Cosplay Chris is keen to share the experience he has gained cosplaying and crafting commision pieces.
Chaosium Inc.
Founded by visionary game designer Greg Stafford in 1975, for more than forty years, Chaosium Inc. has captivated gamers, readers and mythic adventurers worldwide.
Chaosium create award-winning roleplaying games, boardgames, and fiction, acclaimed as some of the most engaging and innovative of all time.
Morgan Jaffit
Morgan Jaffit is a 20 year veteran of the global games industry creating games for PC, consoles, mobile, and alternate gaming platforms including virtual and augmented reality.
In 2010 he co-founded Defiant Development, and lead them to create the critically and commercial succesful 'Hand of Fate' series.
Morgan represents and supports Australian game development through community engagement, policy advisement, media liaison and higher education.
Soylent Cosplay
Soylent Cosplay (also known as Jen) is a cosplayer from Sydney, Australia who specialises in makeup and special effects!
Most well known for her Liara T'Soni (Mass Effect), Darth Talon (Star Wars Legacy), and Hela (Thor Ragnarok).
She is a professional cosplayer and makeup artist and loves to bring sci fi and fantasy characters to life!
Rubii Red
Rubii Red is a proud Lama Lama woman from Coen, in the Cape York Penisula in Queensland, but has grown up in Naarm (Melbourne).
From a young age Rubii was always interested in the arts, and video games. Through her love of art she shares the stories, the experiences of First Nations people and shares her own journey as a young woman living in current Australia.
Her activism shows through her art, whether they're digital or traditional. Rubii wants to share stories and messages of her community through her work and each day she learns new ways to grow as an artist and as an individual.
Henchwench
Henchwench is a cosplayer and professional prop maker. With a background in costume and props, she started early as a teenager working at Weta Workshop on Lord of the Rings, and moved on to later complete a degree in costume at NIDA.
In 2016, she won the Australian Championships of Cosplay and went on to represent Australia in Chicago at C2E2. Currently working alongside Scrap Shop Props, she has made a career as a professional costume and props maker servicing the games industry, working with various games companies and private clients from around the globe, including Blizzard Entertainment and AMD.
Scrapshop Props
Gamer. Cosplayer. Cat person. Not actually made of cats.
"I left my engineering degree and pursued cosplay full-time! Since then I've gone on to work for many of the largest video game companies in the world for launch, promotional & booth events. I have a knack for bringing in game objects to reality with precision and speed, and I revel in measuring every angle for accuracy!
Whether it's 3D modelling, CNC or foamsmithing; I enjoy the creative process. The reason I do this craziness is that incredible feeling and response of taking a beloved character or prop and bringing it to life. Making it real. Then playing with it like a kid again."
Kevin Penkin
Kevin Penkin, based in Melbourne, is a BAFTA-nominated composer for Japanese animation and video games.
He is best known for composing the award-winning score to 'Made in Abyss', and the music to the BAFTA award-winning game 'Florence'.
Matt Burkett
I'm host of the YouTube Channel "MONSTROSITIES: Tokusatsu Vlog" and a life-long fan of Japanese "tokusatsu" (live-action special effects) and daikaiju films ("giant monsters") ... especially Godzilla!
Marty Batfreak
With a collection of comics that started 35 years ago, and an unstoppable enthusiasm for graphic novels, Marty joins Nexus ready to share all you need to know about making your stash extra special.
He regularly attends conventions and has watched the Australian comics industry rise up to a world class standard. Grab a pen for all the hot tips, straight from the Batcave!
Jess Zammit
Jess Zammit is a games journalist, psychology researcher and diversity advocate and consultant from NSW, Australia.
Jess is one of the directors of not-for-profit organisation Queerly Represent Me, which works to promote diversity and representation in games and within the games industry. She's passionate about diversity and mental health, and has been lucky enough to talk about them on panels at conventions like PAX Australia, GX Australia, OzComicCon and more!
Jess is also a co-author of upcoming 'Cooperative Gaming' about cultivating diversity and inclusion in the games industry, which might be out by the time the con happens, but it's still currently in press!
Darren Close
Darren Close is an Australian comics creator. He has primarily self-published comics about his character Killeroo for the last 20 years, most recently the GANGWARS anthology. He also founded the OzComics website, which later became a weekly drawing challenge on Facebook.
Having published over two dozen books and selling thousands of copies in several countries, he has also produced several autobiographical stories to critical acclaim, his Ledger Award-nominated Struggle book was named Best Original Comic Book of 2015 by ComicOz.
Ian Irvine
Ian Irvine, an Australian marine scientist, has also written 34 novels, an anthology of shorter stories, and various other short stories for children and adults.
His novels include the Three Worlds fantasy sequence (THE VIEW FROM THE MIRROR, THE WELL OF ECHOES, THE SONG OF THE TEARS and THE GATES OF GOOD AND EVIL), which has been published in many countries and translations and has sold over a million copies.
Cosplay Repair Guild
We are a group of Cosplay Repair folk who have formed a guild.
We give professional-level free service to any and all cosplayers who need emergency repairs at events we attend. We always conduct our service with a smile and we love to have fun while we're doing our job! Our current range is south-east Queensland and Northern NSW. Currently, we are the only independent repair team that maintains a full insurance policy.
Andrew Curnock
Described by his childhood piano teacher as “the worst student” she'd ever had, Andrew has forged a
career making music and sound for a diverse range of media platforms. Having written music for film,
television, and even making cheesy mobile phone ringtones, his first game soundtrack was for a
Gameboy Advance title in 2006.
Most recently Andrew has completed work on the comedy physics game "Speaking Simulator" working
with Affable Games; a role which saw him creating adaptive music & sound effects, writing scripts and
voice-acting for a suite of characters whilst inventing his own absurd version of Simlish.
Matt Dyet
Lovingly called “Game Dad” by his friends, Matt has been doing games production out of Western Australia for the past 6 years. In that time he’s worked on a variety of games for numerous companies, from relaxing meditative indie VR titles to serious games that teach kids the importance of teamwork in an emergency.
These days he’s a Production Consultant for small projects and independent studios, a teacher of the next generation of game developers, and the Chair of the game dev representing Let’s Make Games in Western Australia. And whenever he’s not being the Game Dad for somebody else’s project, he’s doing programming and art on his own games.
Askar Cosplay
Crafting art is my passion. I joined the ranks of cosplayers around the world in this wonderful hobby, back in 2013, and had the privilege to compete, place, and win with what I've learned from both masters and fellow hobbyists alike. More recently, I have turned my hobby into a second income, crafting props and armor commissions for other cosplayers. I can't wait to share my knowledge with you!
Stuart A Blair
Stuart is a keynote speaker at literary events, French festivals, pop culture festivals, and comic conventions around Australia, and he is currently on his national speaking tour - Tintin Unmasked. His area of specialisation is classic European comic book literature, and 1950's and 60's pulp fiction, television, and film.
His presentations are enjoyed by audiences of all ages! Stuart has undertaken thesis investigations of comic book literature looking at stereotypes, representations, and human rights in comics as well as the controversies surrounding the creator of the Tintin character and his employment as an illustrator during the Second World War.