Our Board

The Performing Lines Board has representatives from business, media and the arts, chaired by Robi Stanton.

Current Members

Robi Stanton (Chair), Vice President at Warner Bros’
Anne-Marie Heath (Deputy Chair), Executive Director at The Arts House
David Doyle, Executive Director of DADAA
Vernon Guest, Creative Producer at Ten Days on the Island
Michelle Kvello, Director at Lantern Partners
Margaret Ross, Executive Producer at ABC Indigenous
Stephen Digby, Founder and Principal of Digby Law

Robi Stanton | Chair

Robi Stanton is an experienced media executive having held senior roles across Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia.

In Robi’s current role, she is responsible for managing the distribution and licensing of television content from Warner Bros studio, HBO and HBO Max across ANZ.

Her responsibility also includes the development and implementation of the strategy for WarnerMedia global brands and franchises in the Australian market including Cartoon Network, CNN, Harry Potter and DC. Robi oversees all revenue streams for the networks business and has considerable experience in commercialising new ideas – across broadcast, digital platforms, digital products and local productions.

Robi (GAICD) is a member of Chief Executive Women.

Anne-Marie Heath | Deputy Chair

Anne-Marie Heath has extensive experience in arts administration and has worked with a diverse range of companies and theatres in both metropolitan and regional locations. Anne-Marie has facilitated audience development and community engagement programs and lead organisations through key strategic and innovative changes.

She is currently Executive Director for The Art House on the NSW Central Coast, a theatre built as part of the region’s cultural urban transformation and established as an independent business model. Her past appointments have included General Manager at Merrigong Theatre Company, Chief Executive Officer of City Recital Hall, Angel Place, General Manager at Wagga Wagga Civic Theatre and Business Operations Manager at Chapel off Chapel.

Anne-Marie has served on a range of arts organisation boards and committees and held the position of Chair of Performing Arts Connections Australia (previous APACA) for 4 years and a Board Member for 6 years and is currently a Board Member of Terrapin Puppet Theatre.

Stephen Digby

Stephen Digby is the Founder and Principal of Digby Law a leading boutique law practice providing legal, commercial and strategic advice in the media & entertainment, innovation &
technology, communications & leisure sectors. For more than 35 years of practice, Stephen has worked with Australian and international individuals and businesses, whose intellectual property is their main, and sometimes, sole assets and who can turn new and imaginative ideas into reality. From innovators who challenge the norm to those who create and communicate things of beauty, utility and/or entertainment Stephen’s role as legal, commercial and strategic adviser has been to help these clients identify, clarify, protect and defend these assets and to get his clients proper value and reward for their past, present and future efforts.

David Doyle

David is currently the Executive Director of DADAA LTD. Over the past 30 years, he has produced large-scale Community Arts and Cultural Development (CACD) and arts and health projects internationally and across Western Australia. Since the 1990s, in tandem with his project roles, David has played the lead role in building DADAA to be an internationally significant arts and disability organisation. Communities and people are central to his practice. Using Community Arts and Cultural Development (CACD) and arts and health practises, David works to actively contribute to the wellbeing of the arts and health sectors and to the WA community as a whole. His strength is a capacity to bring disparate structures together around active responses to population and placed based, complex social issues. David has worked in disability arts practice, and arts and health, across Western Australian, the Northern Territory, Ireland, Hong Kong, Kenya and South Africa, and is dedicated to furthering access to arts and culture for all people.

Vernon Guest

As a senior producer, programmer and arts manager, Vernon has curated festivals, venues and events across Australia. After graduating from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, his early career included stage managing the opening and closing ceremonies of the Sydney Paralympics, and production management for the Adelaide and Perth festivals. Vernon later held the post of Program Manager for the Perth International Arts Festival, Star Shell Manager for the Darwin Festival, Special Project Manager at Sydney Festival, Program Manager at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and 8 years as Producer of Major Outdoor Events for the Sydney Festival. With more than 20 years experience in the performing arts, Vernon has implemented strategic change in complex not-for-profit structures and led many innovative cultural projects across Australia. Vernon is currently the Executive Producer of Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island festival.

Michelle Kvello

Michelle Kvello is an experienced commercial finance professionalwith over 15 years’ experience, specialising in media and digitalbusinesses. Originally trained as a Chartered Accountant withPricewaterhouseCoopers in London, she worked for blue chipcompanies including Reuters, Foxtel and Yahoo!7 in Australia andthe UK before starting her own strategic finance consultancy, LanternPartners, in 2012. Lantern Partners specialises in helpingbusinesses understand their financials, offering strategic andcommercial finance advice and providing hands on support to ensurethey achieve their goals. Clients include larger corporates such as20th Century Fox and Telstra as well as SMEs (film, design and othermedia and digital businesses).

Margaret Ross

Margaret is a Dhungutti/Gumbangirr woman from Northern NSW with over 10 years’ experience in the Indigenous media sector, starting out in print and currently working in web, digital content, social and broadcast media. Crossing the bridge from SBS/NITV in 2014, Margaret has been a Producer within the ABC’s Indigenous department since. During this time spearheading online, brand and social media development, strategy, content and editorial as well as focusing on audience engagement and building and sustaining an ABC Indigenous online community. A productive five years at ABC Indigenous has seen Margaret work in various capacities on titles such as Redfern Now: Promise Me, Gods of Wheat Street, Cleverman, Black Comedy, Black As, Aussie Rangers, KGB, Wrong Kind of Black (social), Will We Ever Have a Black PM? and Blue Water Empire among other titles. In her new role as Executive Producer, Margaret is responsible for the management of the digital strategy for ABC Indigenous, as well as identifying, developing and managing new content for the ABC Indigenous slate across all platforms and genres.

Founded in 1982 as the Australian Content Division of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT), Performing Lines incorporated as an independent non-profit organisation in 1990.

We’ve worked with many of Australia’s leading contemporary performing artists and companies. Highlights include Nigel Jamieson and Paul Grabowsky’s extraordinary Indonesian collaboration The Theft of Sita; Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman’s The 7 Stages of Grieving; William Yang’s Sadness; Tanja Liedtke’s construct and Twelfth Floor; the Chooky Dancers and Nigel Jamieson’s Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin); and Wesley Enoch’s I am Eora.

We’ve had a significant influence on the Australian theatre scene, and particularly in the touring and presentation of Aboriginal theatre. Performing Lines toured Robert Merritt’s The Cake Man to Denver, Colorado in 1982 – the first time an Australian Aboriginal production toured internationally. Other significant works include ILBIJERRI’S Jack Charles V the Crown’; Jack Davis’ The Dreamers, No Sugar and Honeyspot; Sally Morgan’s Sister Girl and the Indigenous musical Bran Nue Dae.

Performing Lines has produced some of the most exciting and significant contemporary theatre and dance practitioners, including Lucy Guerin, Force Majeure, version 1.0, Chamber Made Opera, Back to Back Theatre, post and Aphids.

More recently, we have produced a range of works from artists including Nicola Gunn, Lz Dunn, Ghenoa Gela, Roslyn Oades, Ahilan Ratnamohan, The Farm, Gravity & Other Myths and Chunky Move.

Our History