Creative Australia has today announced the recipients of the 2025 Creative Australia Awards, honouring the contribution of Australian artists across literature and performing, visual and community arts.

This year marks the third year of the Awards, which were established in 2023 to take the place of the Australia Council Awards.

This year’s recipients of the $25,000 Don Banks Music Award are musicians Raymond Ahn and Peter (“Blackie”) Black. Both are founding members of punk rock band The Hard-Ons – Ahn as a bass guitarist, Black as a guitarist and backing vocalist. Formed in 1982, the band reunited in 1997 and has released three studio albums and two EPs. The band is currently on tour across Australia. Also members of group Nunchukka Superfly, Ahn and Black are pioneers of the DIY musical aesthetic at the heart of Australia’s punk scene.

Melbourne-based musician Robin Fox has been awarded the Emerging Experimental Arts award.

Fox is a prolific Australian experimental audiovisual artist known for his laser works that “synchronise sound & visual electricity”, performed in more than 60 cities around the world. He is also the co-founder of the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS), which provides public access to its collection of synthesizers and electronic instruments, and this year serves as Artist-in-Residence with the Melbourne Recital Centre.

Kate Champion. Portrait © Joel Barbitta

Choreographer and director Kate Champion has been honoured with the Theatre Award. With credits across opera, film, theatre and circus, Champion is currently the Artistic Director of Black Swan State Theatre Company, and was the founding AD of dance company Force Majeure until 2015. Honoured for “three decades contributing to Australian performance”, Champion has won three Helpmann Awards in her career thus far.

The Dance Award has been given to dancer-choreographer Rosalind Crisp. She is the founder of Omeo Dance studio and was the first Associate Artist of Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson between 2004–2013. She was awarded a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2015, and her work has toured to over 100 festivals nationally and internationally.

Palestinian-Australian multidisciplinary artist Yousef Alreemawi, founder of the Tarab Ensemble, has been awarded with an Arts and Disability (Early Career) award, as writer Honor Eastly.

Alreemawi is also a writer, translator and advocate who directs the Averroes Centre of Arab Culture and established the non-for-profit organisation ASPIRE, which supports the resettlement of Palestinian people within Australia. In 2017, he was awarded the Eureka Australia Medal.

The Arts and Disability (Established) award has been awarded to Wiradjuri artist and advocate Uncle Paul Constable-Calcott.

Ros Bower Award for Community Arts and Cultural Development has been awarded to Scotia Monkivitch, the Executive Officer of the Creative Recovery Network, which advocates for the role of the arts in disaster management; the  Kirk Robson Award for Community Arts and Cultural Development has been awarded to producer, writer and community organiser Moale James-Proud.

The Visual Arts award was given to Queensland-based artist Jenny Watson, and the Lifetime Achievement in Literature was awarded to poet and editor Judith Beveridge. Beveridge has authored eight collections of poetry; her latest collection, Tintinnabulum, was shortlisted for the 2025 Laurel Prize. She was also poetry editor of Meanjin from 2005– 2015.

More about the Creative Australia Awards can be found here.