The AAANZ PhD prize is judged on the merits of the final submitted thesis or exegesis and documentation of a recently graduated PhD student. In 2023 the annual PhD Prize was reviewed by the AAANZ Prize Committee in consideration of feedback received from the judging panel. In 2024 the PhD Prize was split between research-based PhDs and practice-led PhDs, alternating each year, with the eligible application period being extended to the previous two years.
The 2024 AAANZ PhD Prize was practice-led but the eligible period remained 12 months for that year only (due to practice-led eligibility in the 2023 AAANZ PhD Prize). The 2025 AAANZ PhD Prize were research-based with the eligible period for award of PhD from July 2023 to the prize deadline of Friday 27 September 2025. In 2025 there were twenty-six entries, of which, four were shortlisted.
WINNER
$1000 sponsored by Taylor and Francis
Amelia Birch, ‘In a Paris Studio: the transformative partnership of Agnes Goodsir and Rachel Dunn’, (University of Western Australia)
Abstract
At the start of the twentieth century there was a mass exodus of Australian female artists travelling abroad to further their artistic training. Leaving Bendigo for Paris in 1900, Agnes Goodsir was one of these artists. For many years she resided in a top floor apartment on the Left Bank of Paris, shared with her partner, the American pianist Rachel Dunn. Though Goodsir maintained a successful artistic career until her death in 1939 there is a severe lack of scholarship pertaining to her life and art. This absence has become particularly clear in the recent past as a renewed interest in overlooked female artists has seen Australian institutions struggling to curate Goodsir’s work when so little about her is known. This thesis marks the most significant contribution to scholarship on Goodsir to date. Inspired by Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron’s work Significant Others, this thesis frames Goodsir’s complex and collaborative relationship with Dunn as central to developing a more nuanced understanding of Goodsir’s artistic output. Goodsir’s portraiture is the focus of this thesis. Her sustained reimaging of Dunn as the constant subject of her portraits for almost thirty years has previously been overlooked, focussing on the prettiness of the work or presumed seclusion of the pair despite their location in the heart of the Left Bank. Ultimately this thesis refutes Dunn’s relegation to the status of passive model, providing an alternative which examines the partnership as an innovative union between equals. Through the reading of portraiture as part of a social, collaborative exchange between an artist and her sitter, this thesis proposes a more holistic consideration of Dunn at the centre of Goodsir’s artistic practice, through which a detailed and compassionate understanding of Goodsir’s enigmatic life can be parsed. This thesis juxtaposes newly unearthed historical documentation pertaining to Goodsir, Dunn, and their insular social circle in the “Paris-Lesbos” of the 1920s, with visual analysis concerning fashion, performance, modernity, and intimacy, ultimately advocating for historically contextualised readings of Goodsir’s art which depart significantly from any previously published work on her.
Shortlisted
Andrew Robert Ward, ‘Beyond the edge of the plane: The space of the self in the art of Agnes Martin, Vija Celmins, and Roni Horn’, (University of Sydney)
Abstract
Agnes Martin (1912–2004), Vija Celmins (born 1938), and Roni Horn (born 1955) each proceed in their practice by acknowledging that it is the pursuit of an ideal, rather than its attainment, that is most generative to their work. But what exactly might this shared approach or sensibility amount to? In the literature, writers have often alluded to connections between these artists without elaboration or exploration. There has been a relatively broad acknowledgement of the shared sensibility of these artists, yet a marked absence of sustained scholarly investigation into the exact terms of this artistic correspondence, meaning that potential connections between these
artists have not been sufficiently explored. Many of the interpretive obstacles in developing such connections are historical. For one, these artists are each separated by a generation. Martin developed what she considered her mature practice during the late 1950s and 1960s in New York. Celmins developed the foundations of her practice in 1960s Los Angeles. Horn began her practice in the 1970s in New York and Iceland. Additionally, the literature on each artist has been characterised by a grappling with how exactly to place their work in relation to the dominant paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s, be that minimalism, neo-dada, pop, or postminimalism. The central claim
of this thesis is that while these artists may be positioned at the edge of the dominant categories or movements of the long 1960s, this position has allowed each artist to develop a more expansive sense of space. Hence, I argue, they have thereby been able to develop a potentially more expansive experience for the viewer. By thoroughly considering the dialogue between the work of Martin, Celmins, and Horn, we can develop a greater understanding of a particular kind of expression of expansive space that has traditionally existed beyond the edge of the plane and has thereby escaped the historical record.
Chelsea Hopper, ‘99%: Populism in Politics, Contemporary Art, and Curatorial Practice’, (Monash University)
Abstract
This doctoral curatorial project investigates the current condition of populism as it intersects with contemporary art in its many guises. Motivated by the global rise of a range of high-profile populist politicians, policies, and grassroots activist movements since the 2010s, this research project considers the broad spectrum of populist phenomena, spanning from the far-left to far-right. The Occupy Movement, the Tea Party, the outcome of Brexit, Donald Trump’s victory are just a few of the most salient examples. During this period, the term “populism” has become a catch-all for diagnosing what is rousing, troubling, or dysfunctional in a world wrestling with the consequences of war, climate crisis, mass migration, international trade complexities, resurgent nationalism, and economic injustices. Trump’s 2024 re-election only confirms the ongoing importance of critically analysing this
term and its widespread ramifications.
The objective of the research is to broaden the discussion about populism and art such that it: a) exceeds simplistic formulations about populist exhibition programming and artmaking that appeals to “the people”; and b) exceeds critical accounts of populism as a right-wing phenomenon, which is the main way in which populism is invoked in contemporary art discourse. The research project is driven by the following research questions: Can populism be a contemporary artistic and curatorial method, and if so in what sense? What can art show us about populism, and how can running a gallery be a tool for understanding populism? What populist aesthetic strategies do artists use, and to what ends?
This exegesis answers these questions across its six chapters, which explore four distinct conceptual approaches to populism: strategic, ideational, performative, and discursive. Each of these approaches is derived from political theory, spanning the early scholarship of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, to contemporary readings from the likes of Benjamin Moffitt, Cas Mudde, and Kurt Weyland, to name a few.
These conceptual frameworks serve as crucial scaffolding for comprehending the artist and exhibition case studies that I examine in this PhD. For instance, I offer an original reading of the activist-artists Richard Bell and Joseph Beuys through the prism of the ‘strategic’ approach to populism. Through exegetical writing and exhibition-making, I demonstrate how contemporary artists use a diverse range of populist strategies across the breadth of approaches listed above in their work. Ultimately, this research proposes populism—in a much more expanded sense than the term is typically employed within contemporary art discourse—as a generative and illuminating intellectual framework for understanding the appeal and function of their work.
Suzannah Henty, ‘Decolonial Aesthetics: Comparing Palestinian and Indigenous Australian Video Art’, (University of Melbourne and École des hautes études en sciences sociales [cotutelle])
Abstract
This thesis contextualises contemporary decolonial aesthetics in a history of solidarity established between grassroots Indigenous Australian and Palestinian activists in the 1970s. While the lives of Indigenous Australians and Palestinians continue to be shaped by a permanent occupation, the history of solidarity between these two communities has flown under the radar until recently because both countries belong to two very different regions and seemingly have little in common. Yet, both are a legacy of settler colonialism courtesy of British imperialism with a shared history of decolonial solidarity. Attending to this gap, this thesis develops the first account of political alliances established between artists and activists to provide a historical basis for an analysis of decolonial aesthetics. By exploring the aesthetic forms through which artists have responded to British imperialism and settler-nationalism, this thesis asks: Is it possible to imagine a decolonial future? The objective of this thesis is to theorise a language of decolonial art in examples of Indigenous Australian and Palestinian video art and therefore to examine the capacity of art to resist the triumphalist histories of settler nation-states.