A valued member of the ACTF Learning team, April Phillips, has been named Rising Star of the Year at the prestigious 2022 Women in Digital Awards.

The WID Awards celebrate women and non-binary folk within the digital industries and the organisations that support them.

This year, for the fifth WID Awards, Women in Digital received a record number of submissions and nominations. More than a thousand women from the digital industries attended the awards gala in Brisbane.

April Phillips is the ACTF’s First Nations Learning Designer and a proud Wiradjuri-Scottish woman of the Galari peoples of Regional New South Wales. In her role, April works to bring a learning lens to digital content creation, build the next generation of digital makers, and champion First Nations digital art education.

Since starting with the team 12 months ago, April has delivered virtual workshops with students at The Canberra Hospital School, experimented with screen based multi-modal lessons and collaborated with ACMI to achieve fun special effects for live audiences.

Here’s what the judges had to say: “April’s story is so niche and this is why we have to shine a light on it. It’s so important to tell stories to the next generation. Her skill set connects two fields of digital and comms and to me, it’s such an exciting area that is typically quite siloed. Couple that with the importance of hero-ing First Nations and other underrepresented groups – I hope she’s the catalyst this area needs.”

Check out a selection of recent education resources that feature an innovative digital approach:

• The PM’s Daughter teaching resource (Years 5-8)
• The PM’s Daughter teaching resource (Years 7-10)
• Colour and Light learning resource (Years 1-2)
• Red Dirt Riders teaching toolkit (Years 3-6)

Congratulations to April on this incredible achievement!

You can learn more about Women in Digital here and the Women in Digital Awards here.

You can see the full list of 2022 Women in Digital Award Winners here.

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