BIOGRAPHY
Donna West Brett is an Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Sydney. I received my 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.
A new anthology co-edited with Deborah Ascher Barnstone is forthcoming titled Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2024). I am 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), which was awarded AAANZ AWAPA Best Anthology 2020. My 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.
I was the recipient of an Academy of the Humanities, Ernst & Rosemarie Keller Award in 2017 for my work on the East German Stasi Surveillance Archive, and a 2024 Sloan Fellow in Photography at Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Trinity College, Hilary Term), where I studied the Chadwyck-Healey Collection of Photobooks as part of the project Modernist Photobooks, Propaganda and the Everyday. I am 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,
I am currently working on two sole-authored projects, A Tyranny of Intimacy: Stasi Surveillance and its Photographic Afterlife, and Accidents, Anarchism, Calamity: Photographing British Disaster, 1865–1939.
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.
University of Sydney Academic Profile
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.
