Michael Simic has been named 2025 Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year at the 35th annual ACT Arts Awards evening, held in the ANU Drill Hall Gallery on Tuesday, November 11.
ACT Arts Minister Michael Pettersson presented a certificate and cheque to the value of $1,000 to Michael Simic. One of the most colourful stage personalities ever to emerge from the Canberra region and better known through his flamboyant stage persona Mikelangelo, Simic and his band The Black Sea Gentlemen have performed to sold-out audiences on London’s West End and at major festivals across the UK, Europe, New Zealand, Canada and the US.
With his larger-than-life stage presence and faux-Balkan accent—a nod to his Croatian heritage—Simic was praised by the Canberra Critics’ Circle as a “consummate professional entertainer” known for his rich baritone voice, relentless energy and effortless rapport with audiences.
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Michael Simic (Mikelangelo) - Photo: Sarah Walker
Described by members of the Canberra Critics’ Circle as “a formidable figure in Canberra’s arts community,” she has been recognised for her commanding performances this year — as the Machiavellian sister Agatha in The Moors at The Mill Theatre, Dairy Road (March–April), and as the powerful corporate figure Jen Lay in Enron, also at The Mill (July–August).
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| Andrea Close as Jen Lay in ENRON 2 - photo: Daniel Abroguena |
MUSIC
The National Capital Orchestra
For its concert program during the course of 2024/25, recognizing consistent quality of performance, presenting challenging repertoire and playing new Australian compositions with great spirit and cheerful optimistic audience engagement.
Andrew Hackwill
For his outstanding contribution as a multi-instrumentalist and sophisticated jazz music arranger with numerous diverse Canberra ensembles.
Richard Johnson
For leading and sustaining the annual Sound Out Festival, a summit of experimental music, at the ANU Drill Hall.
Canberra Qwire
For its powerful and bold presentation of Henry Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas as Dido & Aeneas Reimagined, the story told with passionate and touching conviction.
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen
For Journey Through the Land of Shadows, a visionary example of the timeless artistry of live performance.
THEATRE
Christopher Samuel Carroll
For his highly dexterous performance of his self-written play, Cadaver Palaver, Christopher Samuel Carroll. Carroll’s versatile physical and vocal virtuosity drew upon elements of the British comedy vernacular as produced by the likes of Peter Sellers and Terry Thomas while giving a light-hearted not to Australian comedy proponents like Drew Forsythe and Darren Gilshenan. There are very few actors who can integrate mimetic movement forms with high levels of delivery of spoken text as seen by Carroll.
Christopher Baldock
For his performance as the brain-damaged farmer, Angus in ‘The Drawer Boy this actor extended a huge range of dexterity in both vocal and physical aspects of performance; establishing a true role model for performance. His grounded and intense performance highlighted the actor's propensity for creating a highly believable and challenging portrayal of an essentially sad character.
Jarrad West
For his bold direction of The Inheritance, a play by Matthew Lopez inspired by E.M. Forster’s ‘Howard’s End in which Lopez profoundly explores themes of love and legacy in the queer community in 2015 New York. This mammoth undertaking in two parts by Everyman Theatre showed how the past shapes and forms current existence as well as the future. Its message of love, loss, hope and healing resonated through the depth of performance, sensitively guided by the director.
James Scott
For a frightening and poignant interpretation of the luckless servant, Lucky, in Waiting for Godot at The Street Theatre in November 2024. For his sculpted impression of oppressed subjugation in which he inhabited the pain of his character before bursting forth with a cry for understanding in an uncaring universe.
The Street Theatre
For its investment in human creative energies by commissioning, developing and ultimately staging the production of Dylan Van Den Berg’s play The Chosen Vessel in August 2025, a significant and overdue exploration into a new dimension in Australian theatrical form.
Amy Orman
For her outstanding performance as Charity Hope Valentine in the Free Rain Theatre production of Sweet Charity which captured the indomitable spirit and vulnerability of the character.
Sarahlouise Owens
For her extraordinary achievement in conceiving, writing and performing as Anna Bishop in Opera’s Bad Girl which delivered superbly judged renditions of demanding arias with restraint, finesse and humour.
Queanbeyan Players
For its imaginatively staged and delightfully entertaining production of the Gershwin musical Nice Work If You Can Get It.
Alexander Unikowski
For his beautifully sung, moving and thrilling portrayal of the composer, Jon, in the ACT Hub production of Tick, Tick… Boom!
Amelia Andersson-Nickson
For her extraordinary rendition of Waiting, a complex song regarding the intimacy of a layered emotional journey, in the Canberra Philharmonic Society production of The Addams Family.
DANCE
Ausdance ACT
For providing young dancers with a professionally curated and technically sophisticated platform for dance and choreography as it celebrated its 40th Anniversary of the Youth Dance Festival at Canberra Theatre in November 2024 with the theme, What Do You Dream?
Akira Byrne
For her powerful solo A Destination Should Not Be Expected created and performed as part of the QL2 Dance Emerging Choreographers Program, inspired by her own battle with chronic pain and endometriosis.
Alison Plevey and Sara Black
For the exceptional production of a solo dance work, Essor (Thank You) in response to photographic material by renowned photographer Tracey Moffatt on display at the National Portrait Gallery; and for their mentorship of dancer Yolanda Lowatta.
VISUAL ARTS
Sophie Dumaresq and Asil Habara
For inviting questioning of the currents that shape our own material reality and cultural landscape, both online and In Real Life - in their exhibition Is somebody gonna match my freak? at M16 in January–February 2025.
Aidan Hartshorn
For his illuminating installations that render the ancestral craftsmanship of First Nations canoes, shields and hand axes in contemporary glass and neon works, evocatively capturing the disquieting incongruity of our reliance on hydro-electric power schemes and the environmental and cultural destruction left in their wake, for his solo exhibition Fulcrum at Canberra Glassworks (June—August 2025).
Maddie Hepner
For Paradox of Control, a sensitive and courageous multi-media exploration of compulsive hair pulling in September this year at Platform, the Contemporary Art space at Manuka.
Jo Hollier
For her exhibition Creek Walks at the Belco Arts Centre in August. The artist demonstrated her considerable technical skills in printmaking in a series of closely observed sensitive and emotive works that celebrated the birdlife and flora of the bush walks she had undertaken in the South East Forests National Park in NSW.
Al Munro
For her exhibitions Pattern/colour/space/form at the Australian National Capital Artists Gallery (ANCA), February to March 2025, and Pattern Recognition at Canberra Contemporary, November 2024 to January 2025. Her artistic concepts stood out for their bold originality, through geometric repetition and the intricate interplay of colour and shape that filled each work.
POETRY
Maggie Shapley
For Fruits of Exile, a poetry collection that offers an intimate re-reading of the works of Margaret Scott and Gwen Harwood while subtly exploring their resonances in women’s realities today.
S. K. Kelen
For The Cult of What Comes Next, a poetry collection of fantastical inventiveness, which holds on to love, dignity and sanity while surveying the shallow obsessions and rogue technology that foreshadow a world of madness.
John Foulcher
For The Night Stair, a collection of tender, elegant and candid poems that reveal the startling influence of distant memories on the waking moment.
NON-FICTION
Edmund Goldrick
For Anzac Guerrillas, an exceptional feat of research which, in illustrating the efforts by a handful of Australian soldiers to prevent a genocide, reconstructs an overlooked but profoundly valuable story of moral courage.
Emily Gallagher
For Playtime, a highly original work of history, which finds in children’s writings, artworks, toys and games a lifeworld of imagination, fears and hopes that compellingly reflect social change and freshly animate the modern Australian story.
SCREEN
Ann McGrath and Andrew Pike
For the documentary film Japarta, a work of sensitivity and insight into the important legacy of Minoru Hokari and his writing about the Gurindji people. Japarta tells a special story, moving and memorable, about an exceptional figure.
