Welcome to Protostars Season 12!! We are so pleased to introduce 33 projects and 40 grantees as part of our twelfth season.

To the grantees, these projects are the idea that lived in the back of a notebook for years, or the skill they've been quietly honing their whole lives.

They are tinkerers, builders, musicians and filmmakers. They are aerial artists, drone engineers, writers and magnetic community builders. They are examining our food systems and blurring the borders between STEM and Arts. They are reckoning with what it means to create in an AI age, ricocheting from the norm and building spaces for IRL, not URL. They are giving us glimpses into the future.

To us, these projects are a chance to be mere passengers on their creative journey, and what a pleasure it has been to be part of it for another season.

Before we kick off, a huge thank you to the folks in the shadows: the Protostars judges. In the weeks leading up to announcing each cohort, this merry curators sift through every application to help us select the final cohort. Special thank you to Smriti Bangera, Samuel Gonzalez-Altahona, Davies Ayomide, Sam Baker, Catherine Fimmano, Tash Atkins and David Elchuk.

Go forth, enjoy.

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Performance Art

Arts | Ameka is producing Attention, a circus theatre show that uses physical tension, suspension, and aerial performance to visualise the invisible forces of media and distraction that pull at our attention every day.

Arts | Sam is choreographing ROCKABYE, a 60-minute solo dance performance set across a multi-room gallery space that centres a queer body moving through worlds of balloons, forts, and mirrors to explore protection, vulnerability, and rebellion.

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Hardware

STEM | Jun Kai, Shivang, Harit, and Harshita are crafting AeroSoil, a fully autonomous drone designed to carry out agricultural missions, helping farmers monitor and manage their farm conditions without human control.

STEM | Aarush is building Asmaan One, a portable, autonomous, app-enabled cricket bowling machine that delivers game-realistic training to grassroots athletes using intelligent hardware, software, and AI.

STEM | Jasdeep is discovering EdgeMind, a neural network inference engine built directly onto FPGA hardware to bring efficient AI processing to the edge.

STEM | Shay and Sophie are constructing Kelp Goose, an underwater sensor that gives kelp restoration groups real-time, automated data to more reliably monitor and support declining kelp forest ecosystems.

STEM | Nicholas is creating KookaID, a porch-mounted camera system that uses a custom AI model to detect and individually identify the kookaburras visiting his home, complete with notifications and a remote food-release mechanism.

STEM | Hugo is inventing Paint Possum: Full Colour FDM 3D Printing, a modular drop-in module that integrates piezoelectric inkjet nozzles with FDM 3D printing to inject colour between layers — bringing full-colour printing to everyday tinkerers.

STEM | Jack is launching Project Aurora, a supersonic, 2-metre high-power rocket with custom composite airframes, hand-sewn parachutes, and self-made electronics, designed to break the sound barrier and reach 3km altitude.

STEM | Casey is designing SmartMark, a "smart" bookmark that bridges physical reading and digital features by capturing highlights, annotations, and reading statistics without ever breaking the immersion of reading a physical book.

Arts | Justin is developing Obsolete: Aquarium, an interactive art installation where audiences use Wii remotes to interact with projected digital fish, exploring millennial nostalgia and the uncanny aesthetic of early-2000s Frutiger Aero design.

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Visual Art

Arts | Syed is assembling Ligature On The Furniture, an exhibition that prints hundreds of poems written across 30+ moves onto the furniture each poem references, creating a walk-through house-like space where domestic objects hold memory.

Media / Storytelling | Leo and Louis-Sebastian are producing DOWA, a multimedia horror-comedy alternate reality series following a fictional government department that exposes otherworldly anomalies to the public through unconventional social media storytelling formats.

Media / Storytelling | Chuong Dan is crafting Serpentino, a sophomore visual album weaving 13 music videos with original dialogue and scenes into a short film that illustrates the concept and storyline of the 13-track album.

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Software

STEM | Billie is building GeoXen, software that empowers scientists to analyse complex spatial transcriptomics datasets. This means peeking into exactly where genes are expressed in tissue without needing to write a single line of code (wow).

STEM | Manasa is constructing a real-time antibiotic resistance prediction platform (name TBD watch this space). It's a forecasting system trained on over a million NHS records that uses patient data, demographics, wastewater, and weather to predict antibiotic resistance before it spreads.

STEM | Alan is developing Selenium. What started as an AI-powered platform that instantly generates scientifically accurate visual learning aids for STEM educators, making high-quality animated educational content accessible without costly production, has recently evolved into something new. Watch this space...

Arts | Joseph is architecting systems thinking for independent music producers, essentially an AI and automation-driven creative infrastructure that reduces administrative burden for freelance producers, documented publicly so other emerging artists can adopt and adapt it.

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Music

Arts | Tuseka is releasing 'Frolicking is Advised' and 'The Alphabet Game', a debut EP produced by collaborators behind Benee's 'Superlonely', alongside a play currently three-quarters written and bound for the stage before the end of 2026.

Arts | Oscar is composing Murmurations in Music: An Exploration of Gippsland's Birdsong, an Australian jazz album built from transcribed calls of local birds like the Superb Lyrebird and Yellow-Crested Black Cockatoo, woven with the history of Gunaikurnai land.

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Film

Arts | Jessica is writing The Seven Deadly Sins of Womanhood, a six-part dark dramedy TV series examining a different woman and "sin" in each episode, skewering the hypocrisy of patriarchal standards placed on women's behaviour.

Arts | Yanti is directing Dream State, a speculative sci-fi short film following a harpist-stripper through a single surreal night as a migraine manifests into a spirit, using fantasy to externalise the pressures of labour, stress, and autonomy.

Arts | Holly is animating Peephole, a 30-minute claymation about a lonely boy whose curiosity about his elderly neighbour turns to obsession, set in early-2000s Australian suburbia and built entirely by hand over two years of set and prop construction.

Media / Storytelling | Madison is directing Er Du Med?, an experimental surrealist short film that distorts reality from behind its characters' eyes to expose the animalistic, repressed urges beneath the surface of a young woman drawn to a mysterious metal gig host. Sick right?!

Media / Storytelling | Joy and Isabellia are filming Roots, a series following three young mixed-race Melburnians who use music to reconnect with their cultural heritage, blending documentary realism with cinematic storytelling to explore identity and belonging.

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Print Media

Media / Storytelling | Bronte is publishing Glassy Mag, a bold annual print magazine dedicated to contemporary glass art in Australia, created in partnership with the Australian Association of Glass Artists to reframe glass as a vital and collectible contemporary art form.

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Community / Club

Arts | Fiona is building Ground Zero Studio, a cohort-based creative studio that pairs emerging designers, developers, and content creators with NZ small businesses each season, prioritising human collaboration and local connection in an AI-reshaping industry.

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Event / Exhibition

STEM | Laura is launching Community Plant and Dance, a youth-led farm regeneration project that brings young people to the land to plant native trees, dance, and learn directly from producers about food systems and sustainable land stewardship.

Arts | Anna is shaping Ophiuchus, a meditative jewellery and sculpture practice drawing on ancient myths and symbology to create ethereal wearables that sit at the intersection of self-expression, sustainability, and inclusivity.

Media / Storytelling | Nicole and Orit are hosting At the Table: Stories of Food & Future, a dinner series pairing food system issues with the lived culinary knowledge of diaspora communities, bringing people together through culture, cuisine, and guided storytelling.

Media / Storytelling | Lili is convening Roundtable Readings, a recurring listening party where writers of every kind — bloggers, poets, diary writers, email composers — gather to share and hear experimental and amateur texts in a space free of judgment.

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Education / Programs

STEM | Anne is growing Spill Her Tea, a women's health awareness organisation anchored by a podcast covering topics like PCOS and endometriosis, now expanding into a card game to make health education fun and accessible for non-auditory learners.

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Product

STEM | Uzair is prototyping ReBounce, a low-cost, reusable air-pressurisation system designed to extend the life of structurally intact but pressure-lost tennis balls, reducing unnecessary waste through thoughtful product design.