A teacher of 32 years experience,
predominantly teaching music and drama in primary and post primary schools.
For ten years Jude was co principal of a Helen O’Grady Children’s Drama Academy franchise,
and ran an Arts Education consultancy business, ‘Class Act’, working with schools in the Geelong,
Ballarat and Bellarine Peninsula region, to integrate the Arts into curriculum.
She has a strong commitment to boy’s education and pastoral care in schools and the community,
winning two National Schools Excellence Awards at a federal level,
which helped fund a program she now runs at OGPS with musician, Chris Wilson,
called the ‘Buckets and Balls’ program, which works to develop boy’s engagement and self esteem in a school setting.

She has been passionate about community arts for over thirty years,
being involved at the grassroots of the Brunswick Music Festival and a member of Brunswick Women’s Choir.
Jude is a founding member and first chairperson for two years of the Queenscliff Music Festival.
Jude has been on management of the Queenscliff Neighbourhood House for six years
and helped create a gospel choir in her town of Queenscliff,
which has grown into the Tides of Welcome Gospel choir.

She presently teaches music and drama at Ocean Grove Primary School
and is the coordinator of the Performing Arts.
She received her Masters of Education degree in 2007 from Deakin Uni,
researching the effects and impact of the Performing Arts on students with autism.
From this, she set up a consultancy business, ‘A Flash of Orange’,
which works in the performing arts for people with special abilities.

Her other great love is poetry, and she’s written for forty years.
She instigated a writer’s forum, The Good Neighbours, in Queenscliff in 2008, which meets weekly .
She is an active member of the Australian Poetry Centre, Geelong Writers Inc and Deakin Literary Society.
In September 2009, she was invited to respond to an art piece, write and perform a poem at the “Words @ the Gallery” event,
a joint initiative of GWI and the Geelong Art Gallery.

As a member of APC, she has been involved with poetry labs at Wollongong Uni
and has been invited by the APC’s , “Salt on the Tongue” festival in Goolwa in SA
to be on a panel discussing poetry to school aged children in April of 2010.
Jude’s poems have been published in Geelong Writers Inc anthology 2009, chap books
and she is presently working on her own anthology, titled, “Out of the Darkness”.
She has performed her poetry at the “Sea of Words “festival in Queenscliff since 2008.

A parent of two sons, she has lived in Point Lonsdale since 1993.
Apart from writing, reading and music, she loves to bushwalk
and has taken up sailing this year.