Panel 2: Reclamation of our Remembering
Tanks Arts Centre - Tank 5 • 12 July
CIAF 2025 Ambassadors L-R, Shannae O’Neal, Samara Barlow-Fukofuka, Manny Williams, Talicia Minniecon and Georgia McGrath, CIAF 2025 Opening Night. Photograph: Lewis James Media.
12.30–1pm Sunday 12 July
With CIAF 2025 Ambassador Alumni Talicia Minniecon, Shennae Neal, Samara Fukofuka and Manny Williams
Talk brings together the powerful voices of the 2025 CIAF Ambassador Alumni as they reflect on the inaugural pilot program that began with humble beginnings and has since grown into an unstoppable force within First Nations media and communications spaces.
In this honest and inspiring conversation, ambassadors will share their journeys through digital storytelling, leadership, community engagement and cultural representation - unpacking how the program created space for emerging First Nations communicators, creatives and truth-tellers to step forward with confidence, purpose and pride.
More than an ambassador program, this movement has become a reclamation of our digital narratives, and as Aunty Layla Wenitong-Schrieber shared in the 2025 Ambassador Induction, "Story keeping is a reclamation of our remembering". Through social media, storytelling and digital documentation, ambassadors are helping preserve living cultural archives, amplify community voices and ensure our stories are told by us, for us, through our own lens and lived experiences.
This panel celebrates the growth, impact and intergenerational vision of the CIAF x Mob Made Media & Communications Agency Ambassador Program while exploring the future of culturally grounded storytelling in a rapidly evolving digital age.
CIAF’s 2026 Reclamation & Regeneration Keynote session will go in-depth into all things artmaking, collecting, promoting, policies and politics, conservation, and artistic authenticity in an era of Truth-Telling. Our esteemed speakers are made up of artists, arts workers, curators and arts writers, authors, and visionaries in arts showcasing internationally. Representing First Nations arts will be experts of all fields, background and ages—alongside the occasional ally in the arts—bringing to the fore a reignited look into groundbreaking cultural and contemporary arts practice and theory.