Our national Executive ensures equal representation for our members throughout each state of Australia and New Zealand and allows the Association to foster and maintain connections across Australasia. Our Executive Committee members possess demonstrated expertise in the field and in consultation with our broader membership are responsible for the strategic direction of the Association. If you wish to raise any issues or make any suggestions please contact your state representative.
President: Katrina Grant
Dr Katrina Grant is a Research Associate in Visual Understanding and Digital Humanities at the Power Institute for Art & Visual Culture, the University of Sydney. She is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Art History and an Adjunct Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, at the Australian National University. She is an art historian and digital art history expert with a background in the study of Early Modern Italy. Her research focuses on the history of gardens and landscapes in Early Modern Italy, the visual culture of performance in the same period, and, the application of digital technologies to art history (digital mapping in particular). Her research publications include articles and book chapters on the garden history of Italy, history of emotions and set design, the Arcadian Academy and landscape in Rome, and artistic relationships between Britain and Italy in the eighteenth century. Her monograph with Amsterdam University Press, Landscape in Early Modern Italy: Theatre Garden and Visual Culture, explores how the idea of gardens as theatres emerged at the same time as opera was developed in Italian courts around the turn of the seventeenth century, and, how in this period the aesthetic of designed landscapes and gardens was wholly transformed, which resulted in a reconceptualization of the relationship between humans and nature.
Treasurer: Sam Beard
Sam Beard devotes much of his time to writing about art in Western Australia. He is the co-founder and editor of the art criticism journal Dispatch Review and is currently working on the journal’s first anthology. Sam has worked in the arts for nearly a decade and held positions at the Australian Museums and Galleries Association, Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, and The Lester Prize for Portraiture. He holds degrees in the history of art from the University of Western Australia, and visual art and design from Edith Cowan University.
Business Manager: Rebecca Renshaw
Rebecca Renshaw is an arts and museum professional working across education and public programs, audience development and governance in the cultural sector. She has held senior roles at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and Artback NT, and served as Chair of Tactile Arts. Rebecca holds a Master of Education and Master of Arts Management from the University of Melbourne. She lives, works and learns on the traditional Country of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.
REGIONAL REPRESENTATIVES
Australian Capital Territory: Anthea Gunn
Dr Anthea Gunn is Senior Curator of Art at the Australian War Memorial. She completed a PhD in art history for her thesis Imitation Realism and Australian Art in 2010 at the ANU. She worked as a social history curator at the National Museum of Australia (2008-13) and joined the Memorial’s art section in 2014. She has published in the Journal of Australian Studies and the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, among others. She has curated contemporary commissions and exhibitions, including as lead curator of the online interactive Art of Nation. She was a partner investigator on the ARC Linkage project Art in Conflict and was lead curator of a touring exhibition of the same name. Anthea lives and works on Ngunnwal and Ngambri Country.
New South Wales: Nicholas Croggon
Dr Nicholas Croggon is an art historian, writer and editor based on Gadigal and Wangal land. He is Events and Programs Officer at the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, and recently received his PhD in Art History from Columbia University in New York. His dissertation discussed the emergence of video art in the late 1960s and early 1970s in North America, and elucidates a network of practitioners at the intersection of art, architecture and the counterculture.
Aotearoa│New Zealand: Raymond Spiteri
Dr Raymond Spiteri teaches art history at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. His research and publications focus on the interface of culture and politics in the history of surrealism. He is the coeditor with Don LaCoss of Surrealism, Politics and Culture (2003), and has contributed essays to Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History (2013), Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements (2015), Surrealism: Key Concepts (2016), The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism (2019), and Surrealism (2021). Spiteri is currently working on a book project on the polarization of French surrealism into antagonistic factions circa 1930.
Queensland: Molly Werner
Molly Werner (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Art History by Exhibition at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. She is an artist, curator, and educator with experience across galleries, not-for-profit sector, Indigenous-led organisations, artist-run-initiatives, and education. As a part of her doctoral research, she is curating an exhibition at Bunbury Regional Art Gallery in late 2026 featuring artworks that utilise rocks and sand, exploring both Indigenous and settler artists’ conceptualisation of land through direct material engagements with place. Molly is sixth generation descendant of German and Irish settler heritage born near Doondalup on Noongar Country, and is currently based in Meanjin.
Northern Territory: Wendy Garden
Dr Wendy Garden is a Curator and writer with arts management and curatorial experience in a range of cultural institutions. Currently Head of Audience, Education and Learning at Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, she has held curatorial positions at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria. She holds a doctorate and a Masters of Arts research degree from the University of Melbourne and her research and writing interests have focussed on photographic portraiture and photomedia reinterpretations of archival photographs by contemporary artists. She has served on numerous committees for visual arts organisations including the Board of the Public Galleries Association of Victoria and is currently on the Board of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art. Wendy lives and works on the saltwater country of the Larrakia people..
South Australia: Melanie Cooper
Dr Melanie Cooper is a visual artist, art historian and educator. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide and teaches Drawing, Painting and Art History at the Adelaide College of Arts and Adelaide Central School of Art. Her research is grounded in the visual art and material culture of the eighteenth century and reflects an enduring interest in mythology, early modern theories of evolution and naturalism, gender, and sexualities. Her teaching and research practice also reveals a growing fascination with iconoclasm and Contemporary art. Melanie is grateful to be working on Kaurna land and pays her respects to all First Nations peoples.
Tasmania: Karen Hall
Dr Karen Hall is a lecturer in Art Theory at the School of Creative Arts and Media. Her research explores connections between past and present within the Tasmanian landscape, examining the interplay of cultural and environmental changes through her individual practice and collaborative projects. Karen has taught in a range of areas, from art and performance theory and histories to the material and visual cultures of family history.
Victoria: Rex Butler
Professor Rex Butler is an art historian, writer and professor of art history and theory. His research interests include Australian art and art criticism, Post-War American art and Critical Theory. He has recently completed a book, UnAustralian Art, with ADS Donaldson, to be published by Power Publishing, University of Sydney, and another, Stanley Cavell and the Arts, for Bloomsbury Publishing, London. He is currently editing two collections, one on the Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo and another on the documentary film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer. Rex is the author or editor of eleven books, including What is Appropriation?(1996), Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999), A Secret History of Australian Art (2002), Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory (2005), Radical Revisionism (2005), Borges’ Short Stories: A Reader’s Guide (2010) and Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?: A Reader’s Guide (2015).
Western Australia: Jessyca Hutchens
Dr Jessyca Hutchens is a Palyku woman living and working on Noongar boodja, and a Lecturer at the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. She holds an assigned role with the Berndt Museum, managing teaching and learning. Jessyca is an art historian, curator, and writer who has previously held positions as the Curator at the Berndt Museum, the Curatorial Assistant to the Artistic Director for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, and as a Lecturer in Global Art History at the University of Birmingham. Jessyca writes regularly on contemporary art for various publications, and is part of an ERC funded research project, Repatriates, looking at intersections between contemporary art and museum collections. She is currently working on a project on the histories of Australian Indigenous printmaking and was recently a co-curator of the exhibition Black Sky for the 2023 Perth Festival: https://www.uwa.edu.au/lwag/Exhibitions/Black-Sky(.) Jessyca is a co-founder and editor of an online journal of artistic research, oarplatform.com, and she is currently on the editorial committee of Un Magazine.
JOURNAL REPRESENTATIVE
Andrea Bubenik is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research and teaching is focused on Renaissance and Baroque art, histories of printmaking, early modern links between art and science, the historiography of art from ancient times to the present, and theories of reception. Her books include The Persistence of Melancholia (2019), Perspectives on Wenceslaus Hollar (co-edited with Anne Thackray, 2016), and Reframing Albrecht Dürer (2013). She was the curator of the exhibitions Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond (2017) and Five Centuries of Melancholia (2014), both held at the UQ Art Museum.
See the full editorial team here.
MEMBER REPRESENTATIVES
Artist Representative: Gary Lee
Gary Lee is a Larrakia artist, curator, anthropologist and writer, whose artistic career has included work in fashion design, as a playwright, and photographer. For the last two decades his photographic practice has centred on images of masculinity particularly as they relate to issues of cultural/ethnic identity, beauty and self-projection. He is represented in collections at the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum and Galleries of the NT, and various private collections in Australia and abroad. Lee has been at the forefront of activism, academia and artistry since the 1980s.
Artist Advocate: Maurice O’Riordan
Maurice O’Riordan is a writer, curator and publisher based in Darwin. He is a former editor of Art Monthly Australia (Australasia) and former director of the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA). In 2022 he founded dishevel books, an independent publisher of visual art-related titles. His latest book is candid enigma, the artful adventures of Andrew Hau Ewing (dishevel books, 2025) which was launched in association with his curated exhibition Queer Territory (NCCA, May-July 2025), the first survey exhibition of NT queer contemporary art practice.
Indigenous Australian Representative: Ali Gumillya Baker
Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker is a Mirning woman, visual artist, filmmaker, and academic at Flinders University specializing in Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts. A member of the Unbound Collective, she researches colonial archives, memory, and intergenerational knowledge transmission, with a focus on sovereign, creative-practice-led research
Aotearoa│New Zealand Māori and Pasifika Representative: Caroline Vercoe
Associate Professor Caroline Vercoe (Vailima, Samoa, Aotearoa New Zealand) teaches Global Art Histories and Māori and Pacific Art History and Visual Culture. She specialises in contemporary Pacific art and performance art, with a particular interest in issues of race, gender and representation, and has been teaching, curating and researching in these areas for over twenty-five years. She has published in the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, the Journal of Pacific History, as well as in many publications including In Pursuit of Venus, Gauguin in Polynesia, Pacific Art Niu Sila, Declaration A Pacific Feminist Agenda, and Empowerment Art and Feminism. She has also published an online bibliography Contemporary Pacific Art for Oxford Bibliographies.
ECR Representative: Amelia Birch
Dr Amelia Birch has a PhD in History of Art at the University of Western Australia. Amelia focuses on early 20th-century women’s self-portraiture. She is known for her work on Australian expatriate artists, including a talk at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery regarding Agnes Goodsir and Romaine Brooks.
Student Representative: Gillian Daniel
Gillian Daniel is a PhD Candidate at the Australian National University. Daniel’s thesis “Envisioning the Straits Settlements” explores the facts and fictions that underpin visual representations of the natural world in the Straits Settlements. The name was assigned to the British territories of Singapore, Malacca and Penang in 1826, with the smaller territories of Christmas Islands, Cocos-Keeling Islands, Labuan and Dinding added later. Through an analysis of paintings, prints, photographs and other forms of visual culture, Topos explores how colonial-era perspectives on the natural environment framed images of the region, and how these images in turn further shaped conceptions nature and empire. The connections between culture, nature and empire have been the subject of active scholarly attention in recent years. This thesis extends this to the context of the Straits Settlements. It situates the region’s visual records of the natural world in relation to key historical and cultural developments unfolding elsewhere in the British empire.
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