Executive and Staff

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: Wendy Garden

Dr Wendy Garden is a Curator and writer with arts management and curatorial experience in a range of cultural institutions. Currently Assistant Director Access & Engagement at Library & Archives NT, 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.

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 works with industry specialists, museum staff, educators and artists in the areas of public programs, education, visitor services, membership, volunteering, marketing and communications and governance for the gallery, museum and arts sector. She has worked for Heide Museum of Modern Art, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Artback NT: arts development and touring and was the Chairperson for Tactile Arts: Northern Territory Crafts Council. She holds a Bachelor of Ceramic Design from Monash University, Master of Arts Management from University of Melbourne and is currently undertaking a Master of Education at the University of Melbourne. Rebecca lives and works on the traditional country of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples.

Marketing and Communications: Katrina Grant

Dr Katrina Grant is a Research Associate in Visual Understanding at  Senior Lecturer in 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.

REGIONAL REPRESENTATIVES

Australian Capital Territory: Kate Warren

Dr Kate Warren is a Senior Lecturer of Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University. Her research expertise covers modern and contemporary Australian and international art, particularly photography, film, video and media art. Warren’s current research explores histories of how the visual arts and art history have been represented in the popular Australian press, with a focus on magazine and television coverage in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Kate works on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri people.

New South Wales: Diana Baker Smith

Dr Dianna Baker Smith is an artist and lecturer in the School of Art & Design at the University of NSW. Her artistic practice is collaborative, research driven and informed by feminist methods. Her recent projects spanning performance, video and photography, have retraced the movement of Margel Hinder’s sculpture ‘Growth Forms’ (She Speaks in Sculpture, UTS Gallery, 2022), reactivated the archive of dancer Philippa Cullen (Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion, Artspace, 2021) and, with art historian Verónica Tello, reimagined the opening night of the National Gallery (Opening Night, National Gallery of Australia, 2020). Baker Smith is also a member of the art collective Barbara Cleveland, whose works are held in collections including Artbank, Museum of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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.

Aotearoa│New Zealand: Linda Tyler

Associate Professor Linda Tyler has taught art history at Canterbury, Victoria, Waikato and Auckland universities, and at Unitec and Otago Polytechnic. She has been an art curator at Waikato Museum, the Hocken Library and Gus Fisher Gallery. Since 2018 Tyler has been the Director of the Museums and Cultural Heritage program at the University of Auckland. Linda acknowledges Māori as tangata whenua and Treaty of Waitangi partners in Aotearoa New Zealand, and Ngati Whātua as mana whenua of Waipapa Taumata Rau.

Northern Territory: Joanna Barrkman

Dr Joanna Barrkman is Curator, Charles Darwin University Art Collection and Art Gallery. She worked previously as the Curator of Southeast Asian and Pacific Arts, Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles, Senior Curator of Southeast Asian Art and Material Culture at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Assistant Curator at the National Gallery of Australia, and was the inaugural manager of the Coomalie Cultural Centre at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education. She was awarded a doctorate from the Australian National University in 2017 and holds a Masters degree and other post-graduate qualifications from Charles Darwin University and Deakin University.  She has undertaken research, published widely and developed exhibitions in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Timor-Leste and USA. Her most recent publication, Aboriginal Screen-printed textiles from Australia’s Top End won the R.L Shep Award from the Textile Society of America in 2021 and accompanied the eponymous exhibition presented by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles in 2021-22.

Queensland: Chari Larsson

Dr Chari Larsson lectures on modern and contemporary art at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University in Australia. Larsson’s research focuses on theories of images and representation. Her research interests include twentieth century French intellectual history, art historiography and philosophies of subjectivity in modern and contemporary art. Her book Didi-Huberman and the image was published by Manchester University Press in 2020. Chari lives and works on the traditional country of the Arakwal, Yugarabul, Yuggera, Jagera and Turrbal peoples.

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 descendant of the Palyku people of the Pilbara region and is an art historian. She completed her PhD in Fine Arts at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University.

MEMBER REPRESENTATIVES

Artist Representative: Martyn Jolly

Associate Professor Martyn Jolly is an artist and a writer. He completed his PhD on fake photographs and photographic affect at the University of Sydney in 2003. In 2006 his book Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography was published by the British Library, as well as in the US and Australia. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Canberra Museum and Gallery. In 2006 he was one of three artists commissioned to design and build the Australian Capital Territory Bushfire Memorial. In 2011 he undertook a Harold White Fellowship at the National Library of Australia and a Collection Scholar Artist in residence Fellowship at the Australian National Film and Sound Archive. In 2014 he received an Australian Research Council Discovery grant along with Dr Daniel Palmer to research the impact of new technology on the curating of Australian art photography. In 2015 he received an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to lead the international project Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World.  He is also researching Australiana photobooks.

Indigenous Australian Representative: Fiona Foley

Dr Fiona Foley is a Maryborough-born Badtjala (Butchulla) artist, academic and writer whose work is held in many Australian state, national and university collections. Her publication titled, Biting the Clouds: The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897, was published by the University of Queensland Press (UQP) in 2020. Biting the Clouds was recently awarded the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance in September 2021. Her new photographic series on this subject titled The Magna Carta Tree was received with significant interest and featured in a major retrospective exhibition at QUT Art Museum, 2021. Dr Foley was awarded, The Inaugural Monica Clare Research Fellowship 2020 from the State Library of Queensland towards a publication entitled, Bogimbah Creek Mission: The First Aboriginal Experiment released 4 November 2021.

Indigenous Australian Representative: Ali Gumillya Baker

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker is currently working to develop an Indigenous Creative Arts Framework to transform the Humanities across Australian universities.

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.

Student Representative: Soo-Min Shim

Soo-Min Shim is currently completing her PhD in Art History and Theory at the Australian National University. She received her Bachelor of Art History and Theory (First Class Honours) from the University of Sydney where she received the Mary Makinson Prize, the Francis Stuart Prize, the GS Caird Scholarship, the Kathleen Garnham Laurence Prize and the Sydney Scholar Award. She has written for several Australian and international academic publications including Art & The Public Sphere, ArtAsiaPacific, Art + Australia, Art Monthly Australasia, Southeast of Now, and The Journal of the Asian Arts Society of Australia.

JOURNAL REPRESENTATIVE

Journal: Verónica Tello

Dr Verónica Tello is a Chilean-Australian art historian based at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney. Her work is dedicated to engaging and animating queer and migratory archives in/across Australia and Latin America. In 2016, she published her first book Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury). Her second book, Future Souths: 8 Dialogues on Art, Place and History is forthcoming with Discipline Third Text Publications, and includes the writing of Dylan AT Minder, Jennifer Biddle, Carla Macchiavello, Zoe Butt, Chandra Frank, Salote Tawale, Rachel O’Reilly and Walter Mignolo amongst others. She is currently finalising a manuscript on the exhibition history of Art in Chile: An Audio-Visual Documentation (1986, co-curated by Juan Daěvila and Nelly Richard) and the accompanying catalogue/book Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973 with Sebastiaěn Valenzuela-Valdivia.