Dr Jo Caust has spent more than five decades at the forefront of Australian arts and cultural life. What sets her apart is the rare combination of experience she brings — as an arts practitioner, a senior government bureaucrat, and an academic researcher. Few people in the Australian arts sector have operated with authority across all three.
She began her career as an actor, theatre director and theatre manager in Australia and the UK. She then served as Director of the Women and Arts Festival in New South Wales, reporting directly to the Premier — an early leadership role that brought her face to face with the relationship between government, politics and the arts.
She then moved into senior government roles — as Deputy Director of the Theatre Board at the Australia Council and Deputy CEO of the South Australian Department of Arts — where she saw firsthand how funding decisions are made, how policy is shaped, and where the system serves artists and where it fails them.
Today she is a Professorial Fellow (Hon) at the University of Melbourne, an active researcher and publisher, and one of Australia’s most respected voices on cultural policy and artists’ rights. It is the combination of all three strands of her career that gives her work its depth, its authenticity and its force.
Academic & Research
Jo is a Professorial Fellow (Hon) at the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication, where she remains an active researcher and publisher. She was previously Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Management at the University of South Australia, where she founded and edited the Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management and established the first online Masters program in Arts and Cultural Management internationally.
She is sole author of several books and is widely published in peer reviewed journals across the arts and cultural policy field. She has also jointly authored books and academic papers with contributors from more than 15 countries, reflecting her longstanding engagement with arts and cultural policy across the Asia Pacific region and beyond.
Policy & Advocacy
Jo has been a consistent and outspoken voice on cultural policy in Australia, arguing for the rights of artists, for arts funding that is free from political interference and the conditions imposed by corporate donors, and for the vital role of government in supporting cultural life.
She believes that artists and cultural institutions are essential to society, and that arts funding should be determined by peer assessment at arm’s length from political and commercial pressures. She has argued publicly that artists should be eligible for a universal basic income, similar to the model introduced in Ireland, and that despite Australia’s considerable wealth, support for artists remains ungenerous. The arts, she maintains, should never be measured against industry or commercial models — they are a public good, essential to society, not peripheral to it.
International Work
Jo has run masterclasses in cultural policy and arts leadership in India, Vietnam and China. She also designed and ran specialised training programs in arts management and in festival management for academic staff at Asian universities.
Government ties with Asia: Jo initiated a memorandum of understanding between the Vietnamese government, the University of South Australia and the South Australian government. She led South Australia’s cultural delegation to Japan as part of establishing a sister state relationship with Okayama Prefecture.
Her international collaborations have produced jointly authored books and academic papers across the Asia Pacific region and beyond, and she was a finalist in the 2013 Australian Arts in Asia Awards for her income generation in the arts project in Vietnam.