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)










Death Warmed Up

Performance

Lead Artist Georgia Banks
Curator/Producer Anador Walsh
Supporting Artists Jacob Coppedge, Marcus Ian McKenzie
Dramaturgical & Production support APHIDS
Videography David Meagre

Platform Arts, Djilang/Geelong
Produced By Penne Thornton

Commissioned by Platform Arts and Supported by Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Temperance Hall

Images by Sarah Walker
2025 Georgia Banks

Death Warmed Up is an immersive performance and dinner event where all attendees are invited into the farce: what would it be like if funerals were treated with the same paparazzi frenzy as other rites of passage?

Death Warmed Up sits within this world; a TV show with a focus on the food that is being served at celebrity funerals. This performed episode is about the funeral of Georgia Banks, C-List reality TV star of Remains To Be Seen fame.


Texture of Absence

Performance

Devised and performed by Carmen Yih in collaboration with Jiawen (Wendy) Feng

Platform Arts, Djilang/Geelong
Produced By Penne Thornton


Images by Cobie Orger
2025 Carmen Yih and Jiawen Feng

When someone or something exits a space, the space does not return to what it once was, but rather a negative state—defined by the absence of something that was once there.

In Texture of Absence, two dancers explore the physical manifestation of absence to examine how humans experience loss. Drawing from their relationships with identity, memory, and people, Yih and Feng retrace the multi-layered and multi-generational impacts of loss, uncovering the confusion, turmoil, and unexpected beauty that arrive in its wake.


Paradise Lots

Performance

Created By Pony Cam Created/Performed by Greta Cuthell, Breanna Deleo, Emma Clarke, Eza Bakker-Graham, Alexander Devorak, Amelia Vu,
River Madden, Eden Ariston, Lillian Stoel, Hannah Senftleben, Daniel Curnow, Aimee Miller, Seth Johnson, Jasmine Swindells,
Thomas Byrnes and Ilsa Fogg 
Artist Support Sheshtin Honey
Creative Support Enhui Cai

Platform Arts, Djilang/Geelong
Produced By Penne Thornton

Supported by City of Greater Geelong, Vic Health. Thanks to Back to Back Theatre. 

Images by Leiko Manalang-Frequin
2024Pony Cam

We’re creating a new world order. It looks like the one you created. Concrete, cars & slurpees.
But this is not your world. This world was born from the one you watched die.

Experimental theatre company Pony Cam collaborate with a group of young artists to transform an urban car park into a large-scale performance space. Audiences will be confronted with a series of intimate performance works that challenge unchecked assumptions about youth.

Paradise Lots is an experience trapped between teenage cynicism and middle-aged optimism; an apocalyptic fantasia set inside a teenage dystopia


Slip

Performance
 
Performer and Choreographer: Rebecca Jensen
Performer and Composer: Aviva Endean
Visual Design: Romanie Harper
LX Design: Jennifer Hector
Outside eye: Lana Šprajcer
Animation: Patrick Hamilton
Technical Operator while touring: Jordi Edwards

Platform Arts, Djilang/Geelong
Produced By Penne Thornton

Images by Sarah Walker and Lana Špra
2025Bec Jensen


In Slip, dance and sound interconnect in a unique duet between award-winning artists, dancer Rebecca Jensen and musician Aviva Endean. Central to Slip is the sound-effect technique of Foley, used in film where sounds on screen are recreated in post-production using unlikely objects and body movements in a practice of substitutions, such as waving a pair of leather gloves to make the sound of flapping bird wings.
Slip connects the illusion of Foley to the complexity of our present moment. 

The Director

Performance
Creators – Lara Thoms, with Scott Turnbull, Aaron Orzech and Lz Dunn
Performers – Lara Thoms, Scott Turnbull
Designer – Katie Sfetkidis
Sound – Kenneth Pennington


Platform Arts, Djilang/Geelong
Produced By Penne Thornton

The Director is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; the City of Melbourne through Arts House and through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts
.
Images by Genevieve Walshe
2023APHIDS

The Director is a bold performance starring charismatic ex-funeral director of 21 years, Scott Turnbull, and artist Lara Thoms. 

Taking up a universal experience and taboo topic, Turnbull and Thoms demystify, expose and expand elements of the death industry, using humour and first-hand knowledge to dig a little deeper on what happens after we go. Nothing is off limits, including the smell of a crematorium, the tools of the mortuary, and driving tractors into a funeral chapel. At a time when dying costs an average of $10,000 and funerals happen within a week, death can seem like a very expensive drive-thru meal.

Bodies of Water

Performance

Project concept Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy
Co-created with Sarah Walker
Writing and Dramaturgy Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy and Sarah Walker
Sound Design Sarah Walker

Eastern Beach, Djilang
Commissioned by Platform Arts, 
Produced by Penne Thornton

Images by Ben Hoffman 
2023Triage Live Art Collective

 
Taking place at Eastern Beach, Bodies of Water explores our relationship with the sea, as a place of nourishment, danger and transcendence. Audiences follow the boardwalk and listen to audio as the sun sets. The ocean is the birthplace of humanity, of myth-making, an unseen world brimming with life; and now, a place deeply compromised by environmental degradation. Bodies of Water contemplates the echoes between our own bodies of water, and the ocean that we are drawn to immerse ourselves in.

Maps of the Heart

Performance
Written by Abraham Herasan, Sila Toprak, Keak Joak.
Directed by Dave Kelman.
Composed by Callum Watson.
Perfomed by Abraham Herasan, Alphonse Mulashe, Beckham (Bach) Dong, Eto Claudine, Fiston Baraka, Irene Bakulikira, Keak Joak, Nina Untivero, Sila Toprak and Ali Hosseini

Platform Arts, Djilang, Geelong
Produced by Penne Thornton

Images by Sarah Walker
2022North Youth Theatre

MOTH tells the stories of eight characters from different times and different countries based on the real experiences of cast members and their friends and families. Interwoven with these stories are the actors’ reflections on who they are, where they have come from and how it feels to be living in a society that struggles to embrace difference. 

Written by the ensemble and told through fast-paced, funny theatre, MOTH spans Congo, Philippines, Iran, Vietnam, Turkey, Rwanda and Tanzania and moves from the 1960s to the present day. 

Pictures & Ghosts

Performance
Performer and Choreographer Arabella Frahn-Starkie
Photographer Trudi Treble
Director Meg Duncan
Cinematographer Bonita Carzino
Composer Robert Downie
All images Trudi Treble

Platform Arts, Djilang, Geelong
Produced by Penne Thornton

Images by Ben Hoffman
2022Annabelle Frahn- Starkie

Pictures & Ghosts gathers the recollections and traces of a dance. From stark photographic memory to a distant sense of nostalgia, performer Arabella Frahn-Starkie draws upon the relationship between dance, and the means of documenting and archiving performance through video, photography, and notation.

The documentation floods across multiple screens creating silhouettes and visual obstructions, and layers the use of analog and digital technology. Arabella’s marking, blurring and overwriting of the documentation, works to undercut the accuracy and solidity of the documentation, giving her tactile control of the images of herself as she reasserts her authorship over her visual reproduction. 




 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