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Dr Wang Zheng-Ting graduated from Shanghai Music Conservatory, completed an MA at Monash University, and a PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Melbourne on the history of Chinese Performing Arts in Australia. He currently coordinates the Chinese Instrumental Program at the University of Melbourne. He has been invited as a visiting scholar to the City University of New York, as guest professor at Xiamen University China, and as research fellow at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music in China. Ting is an accomplished soloist, performing around the world including in Switzerland, Germany, Lithuania, Vienna and at New York’s Lincoln Center. He has performed with the Venice Chamber Orchestra in Italy, New Zealand String Quartet in Wellington, Stringraphy Ensemble Tokyo, and with Christine Sullivan at Shanghai International Spring Festival. 
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John Bolton trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London and Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris. He was Director of Theatre at the Theatre Workshop, Edinburgh, and co-founded Artworks, a company specialising in large scale community shows and celebrations in Britain and Europe. His directing and co-creation credits include ‘Odyssey’ with Andreas Litras, which was invited to many festivals including the Barbican International Theatre Event in London; and ‘I Don’t Wanna Play House’ with Tammy Anderson, for which she was twice nominated for Best Actress at the Green Room Awards and invited to the Dublin and Hong Kong Festivals. In 1991 John founded the John Bolton Theatre School and later became Head of Acting at the Victorian College of the Arts. An Australia Council fellow, John was awarded the 2005 Victorian College of the Arts Teaching Excellence Award, and the 2002 Kenneth Myer Medallion for Outstanding Services to Theatre in Victoria.

Xan Colman is an interdisciplinary artist and producer based in rural Victoria and active internationally. He works in a variety of contexts, from international festivals to artist residencies, tertiary education to large state theatres, experimental performance platforms to post-conflict community development. Xan is an alumnus of the Asialink Leaders Program, a fellow of the International Theatre Institute (UNESCO), and is Artistic Director of contemporary performance company A is for Atlas. From his rural base Xan leads the internationally acclaimed social art practice Dining Room Tales, working hyper-locally with communities to enhance their social resilience, and to share globally the diverse stories of contemporary humanity.

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Dining Room Tales is a global-local social art practice centred on food, diversity, and the role food-sharing plays in building the spirit of our communities. You are invited to the dinner table to share in the life and practice of an internationally acclaimed artist, as they prepare you a communal meal. In between moments of formal and informal performance, you become entangled in the very process of creating an artwork. Dining Room Tales brings people together in creative actions of social resilience, deploying food, storytelling and performance to provoke critical conversations about who we are as a society, and the future we approach together.