Profile

Penne Thornton is a multidisciplinary creative producer and research fellow working across performance, exhibitions, public programming, artist development and community engagement.
Penne has a research focus on collaborative, place-based practice and is an advocate for social justice and equity in the arts.





Image by Leiko Manalang-Frequin



Email
pennethornton(at)gmail.com


Select Projects

>A People’s Guide to (North) Geelong
>Duwa
>Anything & Everything
>WiCLA


Platform Arts Projects

Performance
>Death Warmed Up
>Texture of Absence
>Paradise Lots
>Slip
>The Director
>Bodies of Water
>Maps of the Heart
>Pictures and Ghosts

Artist Development

>Neighbourhood LAB
>infinity ensemble
>金山 婆 Gold Mountain Wife
 

Publications

> Rising Lines
> Collective Mothering
> Collective Mothering Vol 2


Research

> Making Histories:Young People as Visual Historians of Changing Cities (Deakin University and RMIT ARC  Discovery Project)

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Duwa (in development)

Performance

Lead Artist Amal Laala
Producer Penne Thornton
Video Artist Jarrah Gurrie

Geelong Arts Centre, Djilang/Geelong

Supported by 
Geelong Arts Centre Ignition Program 

Images by Skye Sobejko
2025Amal Laala

Duwa is a contemporary ritual — part performance art, part healing dinner party — that invites audiences to slow down, connect, and experience art through all senses. It responds to a growing appetite for works that bring together ceremony, nourishment, and performance in ways that transcend traditional theatre formats

 I acknowledge the life systems of land, river, sea and atmosphere and the Waddawurrung people’s as the First People’s on whose sacred Country I live. This land was never ceded. I give respect to all First Nations people’s, their elders and rising generations