Artist of the Month, Zoe Waterstrom Muller – February 2026

In Karratha, the landscape teaches you a sense of scale early. Everything in the Pilbara is oversized – the roads, the sky, the endless horizons. It’s a town that seems designed for industry, steel-capped boots and shift rosters.

But Zoe Waterstrom Muller’s dreams didn’t quite fit that mould. While her hometown stretched wide under big skies and red dust, her internal world felt expansive in a different way, with big dreams found in books, in characters, and in the quiet thrill of pretending to be someone else.

Zoe chased stages and playbooks, props and performances. And she learned almost immediately that if she wanted to pursue a career in the arts in a place like Karratha, she was going to have to work hard for it.

Act I

Zoe’s childhood reads like the first act of a play. She’s eight years old, a background character in a school musical, barely visible but already alert to the thrill of being on stage with a keen audience paying attention.

She remembers the weekly drives across town to Dampier to attend drama workshops run by an American couple, Ariana and David Williams, who came to the north west, arriving with suitcases of improv exercises and leaving years later, after permanently altering the lives of many people in Zoe’s community, such as herself.

By age twelve, Zoe was travelling that long red road, past the salt flats, every week, absorbing the language of theatre that most kids in Karratha never encounter. When the workshops ended because the company funding the couple withdrew, she was already past the point of return. The passion for theatre had lodged somewhere deep in her psyche. It was a way of reading people, interpreting empathy, and of sharing stories that could resonate in others through a range of creative techniques and forms.

Act II

The scenes of Zoe’s adolescence in a country town play out. She’s a teenager who certainly didn’t identify as the sporty type despite Karratha being the kind of town that builds its social hierarchies around weekend fixtures and club colours. She stands slightly outside the circle in this world. People aren’t cruel, but she feels she doesn’t quite fit in.

By 2024, this sensibility eventually becomes the spine for her award-winning monologue, Not My First Rodeo, which she writes for the Youth on Health Festival (YOHFEST).

The title of the piece may sound playful and deflective, but it was anything but. It came from the heart, and shared her lived observations of standing at the edge of groups, of watching how easily belonging arranges itself for some, and can be just out of reach for others.

Her monologue explored how hurt teaches you to look outward. How exclusion, once understood, can become a discipline of empathy and lead to inclusion.

The performance went from being rehearsed at school, to the regional heats, to the finals on the state stage, where it won the Top Health Message. What made it resonate was Zoe’s acting skills, and her incredible precision of noticing.

Act III

In Act III, Zoe enters, stage right, having just graduated from high school. The spotlight finds her at the centre of community, and she’s shifted from student to teacher.

By 2025, Zoe has become an Assistant Teaching Artist for Barking Gecko Theatre Company, working alongside Lead Teaching Artist, Michelle Hall, on residencies in both Karratha and Exmouth.

Together, they move through schools and community spaces, bringing drama workshops to the same kinds of places where Zoe once sat with watchful eyes.

Act IV

As the curtain opens on Act IV, Zoe is madly co-directing a musical for Pitter Pat Productions in Karratha, alongside her co-director Danielle Heaton.

In this recent production, she designed the sets, choreographed dances, helped design lighting plots, coordinated costumes, built sets with her dad and directed and guided fellow actors. The experience trained her perspective to extend beyond just performance and to hold an entire production in her head, to think structurally, to understand how individual moments accumulate into meaning.

From here, she’s encountered a few more plot twists (what life throws at you when you are good at things). She received the Young Performance Artist Fellowship at The Blue Room Theatre late last year, as well as an acceptance into WAAPA’s Bachelor of Performing Arts program after a recall audition she completed over Zoom from Karratha.

The stage is set for success. Zoe will fly out of Karratha to Perth for a week at The Blue Room, followed by the thrilling immersion at WAAPA. The network she has been circling from a distance is finally becoming physical, embodied, and real.

Final Act (Unrehearsed)

Even as Perth gathers her in with the Blue Room Fellowship in her calendar, and WAAPA’s acceptance letter tucked away, Zoe is already writing the next scenes.

She talks about returning to Karratha with the same certainty other teenagers reserve for leaving. “I want to teach kids drama in my town,” she says simply.

The script, she knows, is unfinished. It always will be. But the image she holds in her mind is clear: a classroom somewhere in the Pilbara, fluorescent lights humming, a small group of kids who don’t yet know that their strangeness is a strength.

Zoe has stood in that place. She has written and performed her way out of it. Now she intends, quietly, to leave the door open behind her, teaching others how to step into the light when the curtain rises.