Paola Balla (WEMBA WEMBA/GUNDITJMARA)

Paola is a Wemba-Wemba & Gunditjmara woman and is a visual artist, curator, writer, lecturer and PhD candidate who lectures with Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Centre at Victoria University. Paola is a Lisa Bellear Post Graduate Research Scholar. Her art and research focuses on black women’s art and activism, and its role in disrupting patriarchal and colonial dominant narratives and spaces. She curated Executed in Franklin Street (2016) City Gallery, co-curated Sovereignty (2016) & Unfinished Business; Perspectives on art and feminism (2017) at ACCA. Her writing appears in, Oceania, The Lifted Brow, Art Link, Writers Victoria, Frieze (UK), SBS & NITV. She is a member of the Blak Brow Collective who edited the Blak Brow (2018) for The Lifted Brow.

 

Paola utilises photography as sovereign act, in both process and outcome for expressing blak matriarchy & First Nations ways of ‘being, knowing and doing.’