Rebecca Harkins-Cross is a writer, cultural critic and researcher from Melbourne, Australia.

She is currently working on her debut essay collection, Terror Australis: Essays on Film and Home, and undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University. As a 2022 Fulbright Victoria Scholar, she will spend six months at Columbia School of the Arts’ Writing Program in New York City.

Her writing focuses on arts and culture, and has appeared in magazines, journals and newspapers across Australia and the world. These include CNN Style, Art Das Kunstmagazin, Sydney Review of Books, The Saturday Paper, The Australian, The Age, Meanjin, Island, Kill Your Darlings, Metro, Senses of Cinema and Fireflies.

Rebecca regularly teaches in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Melbourne and Monash University. She was previously a theatre critic at The Age from 2012-2015, film editor for The Big Issue from 2012-2017, and film columnist at The Lifted Brow from 2011–2020.

In 2019 Rebecca was a Summer Scholar at the National Library of Australia. She received a Varuna Fellowship in 2018; presented at NonFictioNow in Iceland and received a Women Writers in the City Fellowship from RMIT in 2017; was named one of the Melbourne Writers Festival’s 30 Writers Under 30 in 2015; was a finalist for the Scribe Nonfiction Prize and undertook a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship in 2014. Her work has been awarded several times by the Australian Film Critics Association, most recently receiving the 2016 Ivan Hutchinson Prize for the essay ‘The Shadow of the Rock‘.

Rebecca has been a guest writer, presented panels and read her work at places like the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, the Sydney Writers Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival, Women of Letters, the Emerging Writers Festival, the National Young Writers Festival, Screen Futures, New News, Express Media News Conference, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Shadow Electric Cinema, Palace Como and Cinema Nova.

She’s delivered writing and journalism workshops at a variety of high schools, universities and writers’ centres, including the University of Melbourne, Monash University, Swinburne University, University of Canberra, Writers Victoria (where she was one of their top-rated tutors) and the New South Wales Writers’ Centre. She also mentored emerging writers at the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Critics Campus, the Melbourne Women in Film Festival and high school journalism program The Under Age, where she was the Project Coordinator from 2012-2014.

She’s also been a judge at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wrocław, Poland, as well as the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival and the Environmental Film Festival in Australia. She was invited to attend the 2016 Berlin Film Festival as a guest of the German Federal Government Visitors’ Programme.

Photo: © Ella Kemp