Research

My work investigates the institutions, ideologies, and industrial conditions that underpin the Australian arts sector. Using interdisciplinary methods from history, political economy, and performance studies, I examine how funding systems, state policy, and industrial relations govern creative work, and how these forces are embodied in artistic practice. Through the empirical lens of cultural policy, my research contributes to broader conversations about creative labour, state restructuring, and the cultural politics of neoliberalism.

My research looks back and forward. My current historical research examines the relationship between the arts sector and the labour movement through the Art and Working Life program, as well as the role of key institutions—in particular, the former Australia Council for the Arts (now Creative Australia) and Actors Equity of Australia—in shaping the industrial relations of the arts sector.

By looking back, I seek both a thorough understanding of the current issues surrounding cultural policy, creative labour, and public support for the arts, as well as the good ideas and innovations that have been lost to time. Informed by this history, I examine the contemporary organisation of the arts sector, and seek to contribute to a reform of the structural, ideological, and social foundations of future Australian cultural policy.

A newspaper article titled 'A play about the workers, for the lunchbreak' with a black-and-white photograph of actors on stage in front of a train, part of a Melbourne Workers Theatre production.
A newspaper article titled 'A play about the workers, for the lunchbreak' with a black-and-white photograph of actors on stage in front of a train, part of a Melbourne Workers Theatre production.

How has neoliberalism reshaped Australian culture?

My current book project investigates what fifty years of neoliberalism has meant for Australian culture. The book offers a detailed account of the development and expansion of neoliberalism through a critical history of the Australian arts sector, tracing how key structural changes in the transition to neoliberalism across the nation’s industrial, political, and economic domains shaped cultural policy, arts funding, and creative practice. Tracing the rise of corporatism in public policymaking, the decline of organised labour, and the restructuring of the arts as a part of the “creative industries,” the book aims to show that cultural transformation was the necessary condition for the successful implementation of neoliberalism in Australia. In doing so, it illuminates culture as the locus for contesting its hegemony.

Selected Work

  • This thesis investigates how historic changes in capitalist strategies of accumulation have become manifest in Australia’s provisions for cultural subsidy. It investigates the historical conditions from which Australian neoliberalism emerged and aligns this with the history of federal arts subsidy, with a focus on the relationship between the state, community arts, and cultural policy in Australia during the period 1972 to 1997. The methodology is historical materialism, the analysis guided by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony which understands the state as “integral” to capitalism.

    The first half of this thesis is an historical analysis tracing the emergence of federal arts subsidy from its origins as a Keynesian-led postwar reconstruction policy; through its short-lived activation by the Whitlam government; to its significant destabilisation in the face of economic crisis; and investigates how these events manifest in Australia’s federal community arts program.

    The second half of the thesis examines how changing strategies of accumulation have been reflected in community arts funding, policies, and practice. This is explored through four case studies: Art and Working Life (1982-c1995), a joint funding program from the Australia Council and the Australian Council of Trade Unions targeting projects with a connection to labour culture; the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre (1987-2012), the only Australian theatre company founded with the mission to work exclusively with the labour movement; Creative Nation (1994), Australia's first federal cultural policy that entrenched an economic rationalist ‘creative industries’ paradigm into future policymaking; and The Essentials (1997), a community theatre production written with emergency services and domestic violence support workers about their lived experience of a statewide restructure under former Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett.

    This thesis finds that the Keynesian origins of arts subsidy maintain an irreconcilable tension with the “creative industries framework” now securely entrenched in Australian cultural policy, and that these cyclical problems are the result of a structural antagonism between a sector that relies on public funding and the imperatives of the neoliberal state.

  • [forthcoming 2026] Nantsou, I. (2026) “To perform for no charge is essential”: Precarity, arts funding, and the cultural importance of organised labour under neoliberalism. Amfiteater, 1.

    Nantsou, I. (2025) Disorganised Labour: The Melbourne Workers Theatre and the Cultural Impact of the ‘Prices and Incomes Accord’ (1983-1996). Australasian Drama Studies, 86, 264-292.

    Nantsou, I. (2024) Political Theatre in the ‘Climate of Fear’: Censorship, Dissent, and Kennett’s Victoria. Performance Paradigm, 20, 121-139.

    Nantsou, I. (2023) Cultural Policy and the Integral State: A Gramscian Analysis of Arts Funding. Performance Paradigm, 18, 41-59.

  • 2023

    Hay, C., Nantsou, I., Ashford, L. (2023). The Art of Subsidy / The Subsidy of Art. Performance Paradigm, 18.

  • 2026                

    [forthcoming August 2026] ‘Artists as (organised) workers? Collectivisation, labour movements, and industrial action in the Australian arts’
    International Conference for Cultural Policy Research biennial conference, University of Ottawa (17-22 August)

    ‘Theorising the state in the arts funding relationship: an historical materialist approach’
    International Federation for Theatre Research annual conference, “What Theatre Does”, University of Melbourne (6-10 July)

    ‘Enter, stage right(s): an industrial history of Australian performers’
    International Federation for Theatre Research annual conference, “What Theatre Does”, University of Melbourne (6-10 July)

    2025
    ‘At arm’s length? Whitlam, artists, and the cost of cultural democracy’
    Labour History conference, “1975: Transformations in labour history”, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Victoria Trades Hall (26-28 November)

    ‘From cultural democracy to cultural governance: Periodising arts policy and state transformation in the Whitlam era,’ German Association for Australian Studies (GASt), “It’s Time! Australia and the World at the Global Crossroads”, Heidelberg University (9-12 October)

    2024               
    ‘Bringing ‘class’ into Performance Studies,’ Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association interim conference, “Doing and Undoing”, Griffith University Brisbane (11-13 December)

    ‘Financial data for theatre history research: insights from the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre archives,’ Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association interim conference, “Doing and Undoing”, Griffith University Brisbane (11-13 December)

    2023
    ‘It’s Time’ for a reappraisal: 50 years since Whitlam’s arts reforms,’ Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association Annual conference, “Archives, Artists, and Absences”, Flinders University Adelaide (1-4 December)

  • 2026                

    Guest lecture, “Artist as Worker: An industrial view of Australia’s national cultural policy”, on the industrial development of the creative industries, for undergraduate students at NIDA

    2025                

    Panel respondent, “A Fair Day’s Work: The Quest to Win Back Time” (Melbourne University Press) book launch by Professor Sean Scalmer, Sydney Trades Hall

    Guest lecture, “Australian cultural policy: past, present, futures” on the historical development of cultural policy, for undergraduate students at NIDA

    2024                

    Guest lecture, “Money”, on the evolution of arts funding for undergraduate students at NIDA

    2023                

    Panellist, “Taylor Mac’s Hir: Queer theatre in Sydney’s theatre ecology”, with Professor Shane Vogel (Yale), Hunt-Simes Sexuality Studies Seminar, Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, University of Sydney

    2022                

    Panel respondent, “Arts, Culture, and Country” (Currency House New Platform Papers) by Professor Jo Caust, University of Sydney

  • 2026

    Anastasia: The Musical quietly cancelling shows could spell more trouble for Australia’s theatre sector, Nine.com.au, July 2, 2026

    2025

    Nightlife History - The Arts and Working Life, ABC Nightlife with Dom Knight, 1 July 2025

    “A 1980s cost-of-living crisis gave Australia a thriving arts program – could we do it again?”The Conversation, May 27, 2025