JOANNA KALOWSKI is a mediator, facilitator and judicial educator, and is director of Joanna Kalowski and Associates, a management consultancy specialising in dispute resolution, cross-cultural communication and organisational development.  She has worked for over thirty years in Australia and New Zealand, as well as in Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and India. Over the last twenty years, Joanna has also run workshops in Italy, Germany, England, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland and France, including a three-day summer school for the Centre de Mediation de Paris (CMAP) in 2005, conducted in French on Majorca.

Joanna has mediated over 300 cases: indigenous land claims, environmental matters, community involvement in public infrastructure projects, commercial, industrial and academic disputes.

Between 1984 and 1988, Joanna was Director of Community Relations at the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, and from 1988 to 1996, a member of the Federal Administrative Appeals Tribunal. She joined the National Native Title Tribunal for a three year appointment in 1996.  In 2001 she was Chairman of LEADR, Australia’s largest non-profit dispute resolution organisation, and was their Visiting Fellow in 2006-7. For eleven years, she was co-presenter of LEADR’s Australian and overseas training program.

Joanna has held a range of other board and advisory council memberships, including the Public Interest Advocacy Centre where she served a decade on the Board, and the advisory council of the Indigenous Law Centre of the University of New South Wales.
An adult educator by background, Jo has also served on the Ethics Review Committee (Human Subjects) of Macquarie University, the National Population Council advising the Minister for Immigration, and the NSW Board of Adult Education. She was a director of Sydney Dance Company for three years and foundation Chair of the first Australian Foodbank from 1992 to 1995.

Over the past fifteen years, Joanna has been active as a judicial educator, working with courts and Tribunals across Australia in areas such as managing tension in the courtroom, communicating with unrepresented litigants and cross-cultural communication.  She also assisted judges of the Family Court of Australia for three years during the introduction of the less adversarial trial process in disputes over children.

Joanna speaks fluent French, and also speaks German and Italian. In 2003, she was appointed to the Centre de Mediation et d’Arbitrage in Paris, where she lives and works for part of each year. In 2008, she joined the International Mediator Institute (IMI), and served on its independent standards commission, as well as chairing the reference group setting standards in intercultural mediation.  Jo also spent a year as pilot Diversity Advocate at ANZ Bank.