Card Zero Studio is:

a multi-artform creative practice that builds human scale works from big ideas

an anchor for experimental and divergent creative work that incorporates inputs from artists, researchers and non-artists

a starting point for art that unfolds problems and asks more questions

an exercise in creating encounters that position the body as central to self

in support of radical imaginings

a way to play with absurdity, irreverence and incompleteness as vehicles for fluidity and possibility.

About me: Niki Schild

I am a multiform artist, as well as a clinical arts therapist. Through these roles, I look for novel ways to increase the space available for emergent, mysterious and artistic dimensions of experience, alongside material, spatial, biological and anatomical factors.

My artistic practice has foundations in dance. My formative dance development focused on ballet, and my dancing continues to be rooted in elements of classical technique. I also spent years in jazz funk, street tap and contemporary dance classes, which created a base for freestyling and experimentalism. As a young adult, I broadened my palette in a major way by falling in love with dance forms constellated along the historic routes connecting Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean and Europe. I am drawn to the rippling ways that dance is used across time and space to exchange and encode information.

I also happen to be a hobbyist gardener with a passion for creative herbalism and plant folklore. Both my artistic practice and therapy practice provide opportunities to surface novel applications of this side quest.

 

Formal education

  • Master of Creative Arts Therapy (Dance Movement Therapy) - U. Melb

    • ANZACATA Professional Member

  • BA (Hons) (Philosophy, Psychology), U. Syd

Other training

  • Dance student 30 years ongoing: various teachers and informal learning (ballet, contemporary, jazz, South West Asian and North African dances, physical theatre, circus elements)

  • Vocal training and mentorship under Sonja Drakulich: Voice and Somatic Therapeutics

  • Pilates instructor certification (mat/reformer): Breathe Edu

  • Graduate studies in Urban Horticulture: U. Melb

  • 1 year full-time design studies: UTS