Jacqueline Cosgrove
Jacqueline arrived in Australia from New Zealand in the late 1980s and worked for the Griffin, Belvoir Street Theatre, the then Australian National Playwrights Centre, and as an affiliate director at Sydney Theatre Company. She also formed a small co-operative theatre company, Bardic Productions, through which she directed work she was particularly passionate about. Jacqueline graduated from AFTRS in 2000.
In parallel to her own creative work, Jacqueline launched the Bardic Studio in 1996 to offer theatre and filmmaking classes for children 3 – 18 years. By 2010 the Bardic Studio’s annual film festival had grown into the Sydney International Festival of Films by Children. SIFFC partnering with Festivals in countries throughout Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and the Pacific. Jacqueline participated in many of these festivals as a jury member, speaker or workshop facilitator. In 2014 SIFFC was accepted as a member by the prestigious European Children’s Film Association and was recognised as an important international children’s film festival. SIFFC screened to hundreds of thousands of children around the world and allowed Australian children to see people like them on a cinema screen for the first time.
Jacqueline’s writing about children and film has been published in educational journals in Australia, Croatia, the USA, Taiwan and South Korea.
In 2016 Bardic Studio grew to include the Access All Areas Film Festival, founded by The Festivalists in 2006. Jacqueline rebranded the festival, extended the access offered, and included only films made by filmmakers living with disability. The now Wide Angle Film Festival grew it’s audience from 5000 in New South Wales in 2010 to 220, 000 Australia wide by 2021.
Bardic Studio wound up in December 202 and Jacqueline is now guiding a family business through the current turbulent landscape, while considering what her post-pandemic world might look like.
