Tracey Moffatt

Feb 07, 2026

The Brisbane photographer and filmmaker who became the first Aboriginal artist to present a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale

Tracey Moffatt (2019) © Western Sydney University

In 1989, a 29-year-old Brisbane-born photographer held her first solo exhibition in Sydney. Something More was a series of nine photographs staged like film stills, depicting a young woman in a rural setting, dressed in a cheongsam, searching for a way out. The work built Moffatt's first widespread public attention almost overnight. The same year her short film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy was completed; in 1990 it was selected for official competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Her feature film Bedevil followed in 1993, also selected at Cannes, making her the first Aboriginal woman to direct a feature film. Her name was Tracey Moffatt, born 12 November 1960 in Brisbane to a white father and an Aboriginal mother. She has since held around 100 solo exhibitions across Australia, Europe, and the United States.

At age three Moffatt was fostered into a white working-class family in the Brisbane suburb of Mt Gravatt, growing up as the eldest of three foster daughters. She has described both her mothers as strong role models whose contrasting heritage shaped her awareness of both Aboriginal and white culture. She studied visual communications at the Queensland College of Art, graduating in 1982, then moved to Sydney where she became one of the co-founding members of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative in 1987, alongside Fiona Foley, Michael Riley, and Bronwyn Bancroft. That same year she made her first short film, Nice Coloured Girls, a 16-minute work presenting three young Aboriginal women in Sydney's Kings Cross alongside the historical oppression of Indigenous women by white men.

Tracey Moffatt, Something More, 1989

Tracey Moffatt, Something More, 1989 ©Tracey Moffatt

Something More (1989) was commissioned by the Murray Art Museum Albury and shot at Link Studios in Wodonga. Composed of six vibrant Cibachrome colour prints and three black-and-white images, the series borrows its grammar from cinema to construct what one description calls "an enigmatic narrative of a young woman looking for more out of life than the circumstances of her violent rural upbringing." The photographs do not tell a linear story. They offer fragments, and the viewer assembles them. This is Moffatt's method throughout her career: staged, cinematic, emotionally loaded, resistant to single readings.

Bedevil (1993), her feature film, comprises three ghost stories connected to specific Australian locations and the haunting of place by colonial history. Funded by the Australian Film Commission, it was co-written with Louis Nowra and premiered at Cannes in Un Certain Regard. Her photographic series Scarred for Life (1994) used deadpan captions and reenacted childhood scenes to examine trauma, memory, and racial violence in 1960s Australia. The invitation to exhibit at the 1997 Venice Biennale followed. In 1998 she held a solo exhibition, Free Falling, at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. A solo show at MoMA New York followed in 2012.

In 2017 Moffatt was selected to represent Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale with My Horizon, curated by Natalie King. It was the first solo exhibition by an Indigenous artist at the Australian Pavilion since 1997, and the first time an Aboriginal artist had presented a solo exhibition at Venice. The exhibition included two video works and two photographic series addressing colonialism and its ongoing effects on Indigenous Australians. She was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016 for distinguished service to the visual and performing arts and as a mentor and role model for Indigenous artists. She received the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York in 2007.

Moffatt's work is held in the collections of the Tate, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, MoMA, the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and major galleries across Australia. She exhibits with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

25 Famous Aboriginal Artists You Should Know