Jini Maxwell is a curator and an award-winning videogame journalist. They work at ACMI, Australia’s museum of screen culture, where they recently curated Out of Bounds: Exploring The Limits of Videogames. They work as lead curator on ACMI’s centrepiece exhibition, the Story of the Moving Image, work on games exhibitions in the gallery, and commission work for ACMI’s digital gallery. Jini also works on game events, including Untitled Goose Game Live in collaboration with Orchestra Victoria, ACMI RMIT Games Talks series, and ACMI X WIP night, a monthly meetup for screen creatives to showcase their works-in-progress.  

Since 2020, Jini has contributed a regular column of games criticism to The Saturday Paper, also writing freelance for publications like Overland Journal, ABC Arts, and others. In 2021 they were the founding content lead at Gameshub, an independent games coverage platform, the same year they won Best Gaming Journalist at the Samsung It Journalism Awards.  

Their critical writing has also appeared in ABC Arts, Overland Journal, Screen Education,  ACCA online, and The Wheeler Centre online. In 2018, Jini was one of three Emerging Critics in Residence at the Melbourne Recital Centre.

Jini is an experienced public speaker and host. In 2021 and 2022 they hosted APRA AMCOS’ annual conference High Score: Composition and Sound Art for Games. They have also spoken about games at Melbourne Writers Festival, PAX Australia, where they host the Indie Digital Games showcase each year, Games Connect Asia Pacific Conference, the Emerging Writers Festival, A MAZE Festival, and others. In 2020, they hosted Artshub’s Artist Toolkits video series, created in collaboration with Creative Victoria.

Jini also maintains an independent practice curating playful exhibitions and events. In 2017 they worked as a creative producer for National Young Writers Festival, and went on to co-direct the festival in 2018. In 2019, Jini curated an exhibition of ekphrastic writing and videogames themed ‘Digital Intimacies’, and worked on Freeplay Independent Games Festival as a Creative Producer from 2019-21. They are co-curator on Gay24 films, a regular film night screening rare, radical and archival queer and trans films.

Jini has lectured and tutored in creative writing, publishing, and game design at RMIT and the University of Melbourne.