The Creative Women program provides mentoring and community experiences to help women develop their career in the creative industries.

WADE KINGSLEY, FOUNDER, THE CREATIVE COACH

“I started The Creative Women program to address a missing gap”

The Australian media, marketing, and advertiser communities need to do more to support women.

In 2025 a leading trade industry website published a list of the Top 30 Creative Directors in Australia. 29 were Male. This isn’t about creative directors - this is about shining a light on a problem that is systemic in the industry.

Women are overlooked when it matters.

This not-for-profit program is designed to grow year-on-year. All women in the program have mentoring that is driven by them and for them. (The last thing I’m going to do is mansplain a Women’s Mentoring Program).

Once we assemble the mentoring panel, our participants are able to choose their own mentoring sessions at times that suit them. They might choose to have all their sessions with one mentor, or multiple sessions with different mentors. Each mentor brings different experience and perspective and can be helpful in very different ways.

We also have guest speakers to join our group meetups, plus an offsite experience where all the participants and mentors come together to discuss some of the bigger challenges for women in the industry.

Thank you for your support of The Creative Women program. I hope it is around for many decades to come.

Wade

The three components of The Creative Women program

One to one mentoring

6 × 60 minute sessions across the 6 month program. Participants choose which mentors they wish to have sessions with from our expert panel of carefully selected professional women.
Guest Speakers

Learning from the experience of others through exclusive inspiration sessions. In 2025 we heard from Martial arts expert and personal coach Nadine Champion and leading advertising industry expert Zoe Scaman.
Offsite Experience

Our program participants and mentors come together in Sorrento (Victoria) for 2 days of discussion, inspiration and community building.

Our 2026 Program participants

Cassidy Loane

Melanie Giordano

Emilie Drocourt

Jennifer Dielen

Our 2026 Program mentors

Vanya Mariani is a commercial leader known for building high-performing teams through heart-centred leadership at Carsales Mediahouse and Wesfarmers. A bold advocate for innovative thinking grounded in pragmatism, she is passionate about creativity and empowering strong women in the industry.

Gemma Saunders is a GAICD-qualified board director, former senior executive in an ASX 50 organisation, and an award-winning business owner. Gems (she/her) is the founder of Workplace Edit, a consultancy focused on shaping better workplace experiences through leadership, strategy, governance, and people and culture. Her work centres on creating environments where both people and performance can thrive. Gems is a proud queer woman, gender equity advocate, and mum to two neurodivergent children. She brings a deeply personal lens to her work and is passionate about supporting others to lead inclusively, navigate systems, and build careers aligned with who they are. Gemma has been a mentor for over 10 years to people of all ages and career stages.

June Laffey is a former Advertising Chief Creative Officer in both New York and Apac, and is now a leadership coach, specialising in empowering women to their full potential. She brings over three decades of deep creative, strategy and leadership experience to her clients, along with tools, frameworks and insights covering many different areas. She works across many different areas including finding your own leadership style, the art of delegation and boundaries, growing business through creativity, presentation skills, story-telling to build brands and more. June is also a respected mentor and advocate for women, and has chaired many international award shows, including Cannes Lions Health. She is passionate about equality in leadership and believes emotional intelligence and vulnerability are super powers unlike any others. June also has a deep connection with spiritual practices and runs a beautiful healing retreat centre 3 hours north of Syndey for creative leaders and small groups of women.

Lisa Lie is the founder of Learna, a microlearning app that helps teams build the people skills to solve real work problems - fast. Think feedback, working through change, managing others - the messy stuff no one really teaches you, but everyone is expected to know. With a background in media, coaching, and people and culture, Lisa has worked to help teams grow through change and lead with confidence. She brings a smart, no-BS approach to learning that’s designed for fast-moving teams who don’t have time for theory. Whether she’s speaking about leadership development, career growth, or creating a culture where learning actually sticks, Lisa delivers practical insights that help people take action - not just take notes.

Virginia Scully spent nearly 30 years in media and advertising doing what ambitious women in this industry learn to do early: performing brilliantly while quietly carrying everything else. She rose through the ranks to Managing Partner. She won awards. She built teams. She showed up. And along the way she learned to read the signs most people miss — in organisations, in teams, and eventually in herself. Here's what she knows: most women in this industry don't have a confidence problem or a capability problem. They have a seeing-the-truth problem. And the cost of not seeing it compounds quietly... Working deep inside People & Culture gave her something most mentors don't have — a view behind the curtain. She knows what drives decisions, what leaders are actually afraid of, and why the gap between what a business says and what it does is usually where people get hurt. That insider knowledge changes everything about how she helps women read the room they're standing in. She now runs her own successful business on her own terms — writing The Dimming Effect, speaking and running workshops for creative and media businesses who want to lead differently. She mentors because sustainable success needs a translator. Someone who helps you see what's really happening, not just what the noise says is happening. Who spots the moment "I'm so lucky to be here" quietly becomes "I'm too scared to ask for what I need." This isn't mentorship as navigation advice. It's permission to stop performing someone else's version of success — and start building your own.

Sarah Mazur helps people become more confident leaders and better communicators. With a background spanning agencies and media sales, she has worked with individuals and teams on the skills that matter most at work: leading others, managing stress, delegating well, influencing, having tough conversations and lifting performance. After senior roles at Mindshare and six years as Southern Cross Austereo’s national sales trainer and coach, she founded Agent for Change, where she now helps people build practical skills and shift the patterns that get in their way. Outside of work she’s a passionate fundraiser for Horse Shepherd Equine Sanctuary, kayaker, artist and yogi.

Danika Johnston is a passionate leader with twenty six years experience in the media, entertainment, digital and technology sectors, driving strategic and commercial direction for businesses and implementing transformational change. Having worked across mainstream media companies and also start-up businesses, Danika is well regarded for leading teams to operational and commercial success and for building credible brand partnerships to deliver business capabilities and outcomes. Danika is passionate about people and performance and using creativity and strategy to solve business challenges with a future mindset. Danika is also a board director, wife, mum of three boys, ocean obsessed, and a board advisor and mentor for women in sport.

If you are part of our 2026 cohort, here’s where you book mentoring sessions.

You can book anywhere from 1-6 sessions of your total allocation (6 x 1 hour mentoring sessions between now and end of July).

We recommend booking one session to start with, with one of the mentors.

Then after your first mentoring session book multiple sessions with mentors.

Remember, this program is all for you!

Once you’ve submitted the form we’ll get in touch with your mentor and connect you up to set up a time to meet with your mentor.

Book a mentoring session today!

Feedback from our 2025 Participants

Diversity

“I have loved the diversity of companies within the group. You should be really proud of what you are creating Wade. You are at the beginning of something really special”.

Community

“Finding a sense of community of amazing women who have similar lived experiences made me feel seen and heard. We work in an incredibly fast-paced industry where these conversations can be put on the back-burner, caught up in being ‘busy’ and it was so important to take the time to have them”.

Discussion

“Loved the round table discussion. Very open and vulnerable room that left me feeling very inspired. Great opportunity to meet other like-minded individuals that will continue to build on the network.”

A Village

“The cohort are my new village. New people to connect with, with similar experiences and challenges to me. I felt heard listening to the cohorts and them listening to me. I felt honoured to be given the opportunity, especially having access to the mentors.”

Action-orientated

“There is so much ‘talk’ in the industry but little actual action. Which is what makes this program so valuable. Women have power but not the tools to weild it, so these sessions give us the opportunity to make change - our voices can be heard.”

High quality mentors

“Mentoring has been invaluable, especially the access we have to the high calibre of mentors. This program has been crucial to the development professionally and personally that I have experienced in 2026.”

Reserve your place for our next 2026 cohort now

In 2026 we have two cohorts.

One is already underway and the next one runs from June to November.

Places are limited to 15 participants and are available now.