This chapter traces the development of a disobedient curatorial practice grounded in creative resistance, feminist relational leadership, and new media art. Framed through a personal reflection on gendered expectations, it examines how acts of resistance and strategic misbehaviour shaped the establishment of New Media Curation, followed by an academic career spanning interactive art, creative robotics, and curatorial research. The chapter follows a trajectory from early experiments in audience-centred exhibition making through UTS and Powerhouse Museum’s Beta_space, to doctoral research at UNSW’s Creative Robotics Lab, where criteria for curating interactive art were developed through a series of curatorial interventions.
Central to the discussion is SHErobots, a collaborative curatorium established to foreground women’s leadership in robotics. Through three major exhibitions, SHErobots: Tool::Toy::Companion, SHErobots: Ecologies of Care, and FEM-Me: Feminine Mechanics and Other Kinetic Systems, the chapter explores how feminist curatorial strategies challenge patriarchal structures while building supportive, transdisciplinary communities of practice. Drawing on reflective practice, autoethnography, and case study analysis, it argues that curatorial disobedience functions as a productive methodology for knowledge creation, collaboration, and institutional change. Positioned within contemporary art and design education, the chapter demonstrates how creative resistance can generate new modes of curatorial practice, nurture emerging practitioners, and cultivate more inclusive technological futures through collective action, experimentation, and care.