Katie Schenken commences new hospitality chapter as Marketing Director

Matthew A. Kurian has switched into an in-house role, joining Trellix as PR Manager, APAC.

In this role, he supports the communications function for the cybersecurity company across APAC, helping strengthen their reputation in intelligence-led cyber resilience.

Most recently, Matthew was Senior Manager at The Hoffman Agency, based in Kuala Lumpur. He also brings PR experience from Priority Consultants and REDHILL.

Three Australian independent communications professionals, Harrison Polites, Melissa Mack, and Alexander Liddington-Cox, have joined forces to launch boutique public relations firm, Nomen Partners.

The trio are former journalists, who've worked at The Australian, Business Spectator, Schwartz Media, and The New Daily.

Nomen stated that it will move away from the traditional agency model,  enforcing  a strict limit of clients per partner to protect its quality of service. Clients will work directly with a senior partner, with access to expertise across the broader team.

The agency launches with clients, including Giant Leap, Boman Group, FinTech Australia, Bodd, Simplifi, and Revium.

Alexander said: “We chose the name Nomen because it’s the Latin word for noun. We are stewards to our clients and their ideas.

“In our view, quality stewardship requires two things: firm policies to protect the time of our clients, and support for our industry to strengthen trust in media. There has never been a more important time to take true stewardship of your brand narrative as AI changes the way we create, search and understand information in real time.”

Melissa added: “We’ve led the boom of independent PR consultants and seen how successful this has been for our clients. We are now joining our own businesses to offer the same benefits of hiring a fractional head of communications and adding the experience, resilience and creativity of a team of leaders making for an exponentially better PR offering.”

Nomen is also developing policy proposals to help the communications industry do its part to reverse the decline in journalistic media.

Harrison said: “We’re committed to practising in a way that respects and, where we can, sustain new and existing journalism media work. As a collective, we’re able to do more for the industry and have ideas on this that we’ll look to launch and announce at a later stage.”  

Strategic communication, engagement, and reputation advisory, SenateSHJ, has strengthened its leadership team with the appointments of Amy Watson as Partner and Isabel Zhang as Consulting Partner, Research, and Intelligence.

Amy will lead the firm’s circular economy expertise, working to build trust for a range of infrastructure developments in Australia. She returned to SenateSHJ in 2023 as Associate Partner, having started her career as an intern with the firm.

Isabel joins SenateSHJ to lead its research and intelligence offering, including working on evidence-backed communication and insight-driven cross-cultural engagement. She brings more than 23 years’ experience working across Asia Pacific, navigating complex policy, stakeholder, and business challenges.

Darren Behar, SenateSHJ’s Chief Executive Officer, said the appointments reflected the consultancy’s continued investment in specialist expertise and cross-sector capability.

“Amy’s promotion recognises the value she has created for our clients and our business, while Isabel’s appointment will allow us to embed research and intelligence more deeply across our work.

“Strengthening our circular economy and research and intelligence expertise will help clients respond to these challenges with greater clarity and confidence.”