Licensing & Distribution Officer

About the National Film and Sound Archive

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) is Australia’s audiovisual archive, telling the national story by collecting, preserving and sharing audiovisual media, the cultural experience platforms of our time. The collection itself dates back to 1935, making it one of the world’s oldest audiovisual collections. It is also one of the country’s most used cultural collections, with around 125 million views of collection content each year. The NFSA is in a period of significant change. Following increased Government investment, the institution is in a process of digital transformation, establishing the NFSA as Australia’s most dynamic and valued cultural organisation. We are rebuilding our curatorial workforce and developing the NFSA’s capacity to digitise our collection at scale – to preserve it for the future, to make sure it can be discovered, and to share it with all Australians.

We continue to work on developing a stable, secure and future-proof workforce across our four physical sites based in Canberra and Mitchell in the ACT as well as in Sydney and Melbourne.

We are also undergoing a program of business improvement for many of our corporate systems to improve efficiency and reduce manual handling.

We are an ambitious organisation, and we aim to be an employer of choice within the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector, providing exciting and challenging work, as well as favourable employment conditions and unique development opportunities for our staff.

About the Team

The Rights and Distribution team is part of the NFSA Enterprises Branch, that provides professional access to the national collection through footage sales, theatrical screening loans, and distribution partnerships. The Enterprises Branch also supports internal teams with rights advice and licensing for projects and partnerships.

The Rights and Distribution team is continually looking to improve the efficiency of rights management, to enable greater use of the collection.

The Enterprises Branch is an energetic team committed to providing excellent service to our clients and are based in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra.

The Opportunity

The Licensing and Distribution Officer plays a key role in supporting the management of rights clearances and licensing activities for NFSA projects, products and online platforms. This includes facilitating the distribution and licensing of NFSA collection material, verifying rights in NFSA titles, including the Film Australia Collection and managing rights-related matters across NFSA digital platforms to support the compliant distribution of content.

The role supports the NFSA Digitisation Strategy by researching, updating and maintaining rights information and agreements within the collections database and digital rights management systems. Working within a busy and collaborative team, the Licensing and Distribution Officer also work across the NFSA, to support rights clearances and licensing activities.

The position requires an understanding of the Australian cultural sector, the film, sound, broadcast or digital publishing industries and experience working with copyright material, particularly audiovisual materials. The Licensing and Distribution Officer will maintain and develop the professional relationships the NFSA has established with external stakeholders.

The Licensing and Distribution Officer will work confidently within an information management environment, using applications such as Office 365, Content Manager and media asset databases. In addition, they will be able to identify and navigate a range of databases and online resources to support research and rights records management.

A full job description is available here: https://candidate.aurion.cloud/nfsa/production/redirect/to/dmFjYW5jaWVzLzI5MTIxODI0NjgxMDAzOTl-MS9lZGl0

Note:  Applications for this role MUST be submitted via the NFSA recruitment portal (website above). Applications submitted to the SEEK website will NOT be considered.

Applications close at 11:59pm AEDT/AEST on Monday, 05 October 2026.