Full Name: Alina Gozin'a
Current Role: AFR Magazine Cover Shoots Photographer
Board Member: UTS - TD School. Keynote Speaker on Creative Intelligence.
Current Organisation: Self-employed
Last Role at PwC: Tax advisor
Time at PwC: 2009 - 2012
What’s your fondest memory from your time at PwC?
Disney was one of our clients, and we (the tax team) were invited to the Melbourne premiere of one of their film releases. It sounds minor in the retelling, but it was cool. That overlap of the serious and the creative has stayed with me.
How did your experience at PwC support or shape your career path? Are there any skills or lessons from your time at PwC that you still find valuable in the work you do today?
More than most people would expect tax legislation demands a very particular kind of attention. That habit of paying attention and noticing what others skim over, turned out to be exactly the skill that makes a great portrait photographer. It’s all in the detail!
I also learned that rigour is not the enemy of creativity. The discipline I’ve built at PwC is what allows me to operate at the level I do now. Clients trust me with their most senior people and high calibre, large-scale projects because I understand how organisations think and I understand budgets, not just the creative goal.
At what moment did you realise that photography and visual storytelling, rather than tax, was the path you needed to follow?
I didn't. My mother did that for me.
She came to visit me at PwC for lunch and said: "My only child is a tax advisor. Why? I invested so much into you. I had hopes you would be creative." True story. I know! A parent actively encouraging their child to leave a stable career and step into the chaos of the arts. So I left. I went back to uni and studied Media Arts & Production at UTS. Years later, when I was appointed to the Industry Advisory Board at UTS TD School, it had a particular resonance. The place that changed my life is now somewhere I get to give something back.
The footnote to that story is that I did not actually want to leave PwC. I loved the tax work. I spent a long time trying to work out whether I could somehow do both. The world back then was not ready for that kind of thinking. Now, in the AI era, I believe we are heading into a new Renaissance, one in which the arts and sciences finally start dancing together. I was just early.
You sit on the Industry Advisory Board at the UTS TD School, the world's first faculty dedicated to Creative Intelligence and Innovation. What change are you hoping to drive through that work?
One cultural shift: start treating creativity not as fluff, but as a business asset.
Creativity is not painting or sculpting. It is a cognitive capability - the ability to see the old in a new light, to think laterally, to ask "what if" rather than "what is." That is what drives innovation. And it is uniquely human. AI cannot replicate it.
The Renaissance understood this. It cross-pollinated the arts and sciences: right brain, left brain, and produced extraordinary leaps in both. Then the Industrial Revolution arrived, ROI took over, and creativity got filed under "arts" and left out of the boardroom. I argue that was a mistake.
What I hope to drive through UTS TD School is simple: the normalisation of Creative Intelligence as a core business competency. Not a nice-to-have. Not a culture initiative. A measurable strategic advantage.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, surveying over 1,000 leading global employers, ranks creative thinking fourth among the most critical human skills today, and rising fast.
The data is in. Business just hasn't caught up yet. I wrote about this for TEDxSydney: Creativity Isn't Fluff. It Never Was, and it’s the foundation of my keynote, The Art of Seeing.
You photograph some of the most powerful and recognisable people in the country. Is there a shot that stands out to you?
Photography is about taste, not just technical knowledge of cameras and light. It is also about trust, and the vibe between two people on either side of the lens.
Sir Frank Lowy was deeply special. There is a stillness to someone who has built that much. Scott Farquhar was smart, cool and nice. The Canva shoot with Melanie and Cliff was so joyful and fun in the best way. Andrew Forrest was wild and completely his own thing. Christine Lagarde was, in a word, a queen. Anthony Pratt's team told me I had fifteen minutes before his plane was wheels up, and we made it work. Judith Neilson was divine in every sense, as was Sam Mostyn AC, our Governor-General - there is a grace to her that translates directly.
You are only as good as your last shoot, and I know exactly how much is on the line every single time. The fact that nothing has ever gone catastrophically wrong is a blessing
What has been the most surprising lesson your two very different careers have taught you?
How similar they are.
Work very hard. Be the best in your field. Know your numbers, your crew, your brief, know what the person across the table needs and above all- know yourself! Integrity and reputation eat CV for breakfast.
Current focus What are you working on right now that you're most excited about?
Three things, all happening at once.
My upcoming solo exhibition, Sydney Love Stories: CONFESSED. It is the fourth and final chapter of a decade-long series I began in New York in 2016.
And I have just been appointed inaugural Artist in Residence at The Sandstones Club, at the LANDS by Capella in Sydney.
Is there a book or podcast you can’t get enough of right now?
Great Lives (BBC Radio 4), which is exactly what it sounds like and never disappoints. And The Rest is History (with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook), for anyone who wants to understand why the past is not nearly as finished as it appears.
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