Brenna Ternus
Brenna Ternus is an educator, artist and theatremaker who has lived and worked all over the world. Their practice is all about collaborating with young people and the community on programs or performances that foreground underrepresented voices.
While studying theatre and interdisciplinary arts at Yale University, they co-wrote an interactive children’s musical called The Dinosaur Hunters about the dawn of American paleontology, and produced/performed in a touring production across 10 US states. Their other musicals Doc Patterson’s Dragonbone Storyshow and Bunkerville were both produced at Yale, with the latter chosen for the Yale Dramatic Association’s Commencement Musical – the first student-written show to be produced on that scale in three decades. After graduating, they taught photography and creative writing to young people in New Orleans and then moved to Beijing to build an experimental arts-integrated learning centre called Armada.
Brenna relocated to Melbourne in 2017 and spent a year orchestrating immersive wellbeing programs at the Reach Foundation before taking over the Early Harvest youth publishing project at 100 Story Building in Footscray. Since then, they have supported ensembles of young people to create four professionally-published short story anthologies, with a fifth in the works for 2023.
Their other recent projects include: Imagination Gamespaces (ArtPlay New Ideas Lab), a program empowering young people to design and build their own story-based escape rooms; Years of Our Lives (City of Melbourne/Victorian Seniors Festival), a lockdown-era community timeline project for older adults; The Museum of Moving Memories, an interactive bicycle-based theatre experience; and How Long is a Piece of String (MPavilion/100 Story Building), a string-based interactive storytelling installation.
Brenna is currently the Senior Producer for Creative Learning at 100 Story Building, and they also oversee arts enrichment programming at Carlton Primary School. They have been an eager supporter and volunteer at Western Edge since being wowed by The Watching in 2019, and they’re thrilled to have joined the team in developing new programs.