Brenda Croft

Brenda L. Croft (b. 1964), artist, curator, lecturer and freelance writer, is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victoria River region in the Northern Territory, and also has Anglo-Australian/German/Irish/Chinese heritage.

Following study at the Canberra School of Art, she was a founding member (and later general manager) of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Sydney, and gained her master’s degree in Art Administration in 1995. She was the first Australian recipient of the Chicago Artists International Program grant in 1996, and the following year she was resident artist at the Australia Council Greene St Studio in New York. She has worked as a curator at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the National Gallery of Australia, where she established the National Indigenous Art Triennial. Major shows she has curated include fluent: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and Beyond the Pale: Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art for the Telstra Adelaide Festival in 2000. A practising artist since 1985, her own work has been exhibited at major exhibitions nationally and internationally and she is represented in public and private collections in Australia and overseas. In 2000 her major commissioned work Wuganmagulya (Farm Cove) was officially launched as part of the Sydney City Council’s Sculpture Walk at the Royal Botanic Gardens, and another commissioned work was unveiled at Sydney International Airport. Croft won the 2013 Deadly Award for Visual Artist of the Year and was one of two fellowship recipients at the 2015 Australia Council’s National Indigenous Arts Awards. Croft has been Associate Professor of Indigenous Art History and Curatorship at the ANU School of Art and Design since 2018.