Donna West Brett is an Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2013. Areas of expertise include the history and theory of photography, modernism, international contemporary art, curatorial practice & theory.

Brett is author of Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge 2016) and co-editor with Natalya Lusty of Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge 2019). Her writings on photography have been published in renowned edited collections, book reviews and articles in leading journals including History of Photography, Photographies and Photography & Culture.

Curated exhibitions include Unconscious Places: Photography and History, GCS Gallery, 2018, Ann Shelton: In a Forest, Australian Centre for Photography, 2012 (co-curator) and Joseph Beuys and the ‘Energy Plan’, University of Sydney, 2012.

Brett is an editorial board member for the Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury Academic, former editor & reviews editor for the Australian & NZ Journal of Art, Research Leader for the Photographic Cultures Research Group, recipient of the 2017 Australian Academy of the Humanities, Ernst and Rosemarie Keller Award, and Sloan Fellow in Photography at Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Trinity College) 2023-24.

University of Sydney Academic Profile

Academia

I respectfully acknowledge the Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation, whose sovereignty over the lands on which I work and live was never ceded.

PHOTO: Dr Stephen Little, London. IMAGE: Ilse Bing, Selfportrait with Leica, 1931.