Deborah Kelly Sydney

Born 1962 in Melbourne, Victoria, lives in Sydney. She has been making socially engaged artwork since 1983. She was also Creative Director of Australia's largest public interest communications company for 7 years. Her projects seek to implicate broad audiences in the discourses of local histories, and to intervene into representation of place and power. Recent collaborative projects have included boat-people.org, graphic civil disobedience on refugees, mass actions on Aboriginal Land Rights, and the prize-winning public art project with Tina Fiveash "Hey, hetero!", shown in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Wellington. She co-curated and conceived the 2002 exhibition, symposium and tactical media lab BORDERPANIC, a Performance Space/Museum of Contemporary Art/Next 5-Minutes co-production, with Zina Kaye. She has given public lectures and workshops around Australia and in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Ottawa. Her current projects include being commissioning editor/artist for "It's Great to Be Straight: a Critical Anthology Regarding Heterosexuality", boat people.org, and the ongoing "Refugee Legal Information Project" together with Smash Racism.