About All About Women
8 – 9 March 2025
All About Women is the Sydney Opera House’s festival of ideas about gender, justice, and equality, held annually in the week of International Women’s Day. Enormously successful and celebrated, it fills our venues with buzzy, inspiring, and agenda-setting conversations.
Now in its 13th year, the festival brings international and Australian artists, thinkers and storytellers together to explore the big ideas important to women, gender diverse people and their allies.
The festival is programmed by the Sydney Opera House Talks & Ideas team led by Chip Rolley (he/him) alongside this year’s prodigious co-curators of individual sessions: Whadjuk Noongar journalist and 10 News First Presenter Narelda Jacobs OAM (she/her) and award-winning actor and writer for stage, screen and print Michelle Law (she/her).
The full program of international and Australian artists, thinkers and storytellers for All About Women 2025 will be announced in January.
meet the 2025 co-curators
Narelda Jacobs (she/her)
Narelda Jacobs OAM is a Whadjuk Noongar journalist and presenter. Her career at Network 10 spans more than two decades. Narelda presents the daily one-hour national news bulletin 10 News First: Lunchtime and 10 News First: Afternoons. You'll also find her on NITV and SBS, the ABC, podcast airwaves, appearing in documentaries and Australian dramas, hosting events around the country and internationally, sharing her lived experience on panels and giving back to her community through various ambassadorial and board roles.
Michelle Law (she/her)
Michelle Law is a writer and actor – working in print, screen and stage – currently based on Gadigal Land. Her works include the plays, Single Asian Female, Top Coat and Miss Peony; the television shows Homecoming Queens and Safe Home; and the book Asian Girls are Going Places. Her awards include two Australian Writers Guild Awards, the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award, and the Arts & Culture 40 Under 40 Awards, which celebrates the country’s most influential Asian Australians. Michelle is also a widely published freelance author and a prolific speaker who regularly appears on panels and at festivals.
Chip Rolley (he/him)
Head of Talks & Ideas
Chip Rolley joined the Sydney Opera House as Head of Talks & Ideas in September 2021.
Rolley has curated festivals in Sydney and New York City, first as artistic director of Sydney Writers’ Festival, and most recently in New York as director of PEN America’s World Voices Festival, one of America’s most diverse writers’ festivals. He also oversaw the prestigious PEN Literary Awards and a slate of literary programs that engaged traditionally under-served participants and audiences.
He has edited the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s opinion and news analysis website, The Drum. His writing has covered a very wide range of subjects from politics to poetry, with a particular focus on literature and Chinese politics and culture. His writing has appeared in The Guardian (US), Wall Street Journal, Griffith Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian, The Bulletin, Vogue, Rolling Stone and he has translated essays and poetry from Chinese to English.
