MEANJIN

BASED

THEATRE

COLLECTIVE.

Welcome to Salad Days Collective! EST 2024.

An interdisciplinary theatre collective that started out with $500, a safety pin, and a dream.

We believe in the power of art as transformation—and we’re not afraid to put our full guts on display. Our mission is to champion boundary-defying theatre that challenges form, platform, and expectation. We are committed to bringing young, non-traditional audiences back into the theatre and to platforming bold, independent work made right here in Queensland. Our work is loud, messy, and sometimes downright abhorrent. We revel in contradiction: the beautiful and the brutal, the sacred and the stupid, the rageful and the tender.

Salad Days was founded in 2024 by Queensland actors Jasmine Prasser and Leo Buzac, following three years of formal training at TAFE QLD / The University of Canberra. Born from a shared hunger for ambitious, provocative work—and a deep frustration with creative spaces defined by commercial safety—Salad Days was built to be something different. From the beginning, our goal was never just to make art that sells, but to make art that dares. We define success not by outcome, but by process: the act of creating bold, challenging, collaborative work is the win.

Now co-led by Jasmine Prasser and Georgina Sawyer, the collective has grown from a two-person idea into a fast, fiercely evolving creative company—producing work that’s as fearless as it is unforgettable. We platform bold voices—new, forgotten, and often overlooked—and centre stories that are queer, feminist, unpolished, and urgent. From gritty contemporary texts to original experimental work, our programming reflects a hunger for risk and a refusal to play it safe.

In 2025, we were awarded the Queensland ‘Bille Brown’ Matilda Award for Best Emerging Artist, recognised for our 2024 body of work: After the End by Dennis Kelly, Scenes with Girls by Miriam Battye, and LOVE by Patricia Cornelius.

We believe that theatre can’t be polite to be powerful.