About Us

Meet the Team

All of the team are very experienced with working with creatives.  We speak in artist’s language and have years of experience with helping artists to manage their talent, their creativity and themselves. 

John Paul Fischbach

CEO & Chief Alchemist

John Paul maintains a personal balance between business projects and creative projects. On the creative side he has written and published a children’s book, Phillip the Penguin, created the International Puppet Carnival, directed several independent plays and opera. His first film, Shoelace, has been screened worldwide in over 30 festivals, his trans-media project, True Secrets Melbourne, a smart-phone app guides visitors through the twisted history of the city. His comedy web series, Sex or Breakfast has had over 1 million views. His book, No More Starving Artists – How to Master your Art, Your Life & Build your Business is now available.

John Paul has worked for over 30 years in the creative industries. He has a unique combination of artistic creativity, marketing know-how and business acumen.
He has a long history of producing and directing theatre, film, festivals and site-specific events, from the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles to an interactive dance and visual art performance at the Substation in Newport, VIC. He has lived and worked in the U.S., Canada, Denmark, England, Bali and Australia.

His arts management and marketing advice has been featured in monthly columns for Creative Foyer and Arts Hub.

Alia Vryens

Productivity & Business Start Up Coach & Girl Friday

Alia Vryens has started businesses and projects in just about every art form imaginable. An emerging-mid career artist who’s in the midst of using current technology to grow her own creative businesses, Alia excels at sharing these tools with the artists coming through the Incubator. As an Arts administrator and Project Manager, she combines extensive experience in the corporate sector with arts based practical experience.

A craftsperson, jeweler, game maker, theatre maker, musician, actor, comedian, touring performing artist, graphic designer, video editor and online content creator, Alia self-produces her projects, sometimes working solo and sometimes as part of a small team.

Liz O’Brien

Belief Buster

Liz O’Brien is a trained healthcare professional with clinical experience in stress and lifestyle management. She also teaches wellbeing and stress management at Monash University School of Medicine.

Liz works with individuals using strategies and tools to support them in becoming their best self and become their fullest expression of that self.

She also works with organisations that need their people to be at the top of their game and give their best. In order to help them achieve that, she shows people how to manage their mental and physical energy to achieve peak performance and maintain a healthy work/life balance. Her Health Enhancement for Living Program is practical, engaging and experiential. It incorporates evidence-based stress reduction strategies, information and cognitive tools.

Julie-Anne Black

Producer of Bold & Irresistible Communicators

Julie-Anne is an international speaker, author and founder of Be Brilliant Now – a company which produces emerging leaders that are irresistible communicators. She is also part of the Auspicious Arts Incubator core coaching team.

Before joining the incubator team she was a top TV Producer producing shows including Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and was a production manager for the Sydney Olympic Games Opening Ceremony. She’s since retrained herself as a mindset, body language and NLP Trainer and is now the Incubator’s Producer of Bold & Irresistible Communicators.