In this biography
Quick facts
- Born
- 1960
- Birthplace
- Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
- Country
- Australia
- Nationality
- Not independently established
- Known for
- Staged images
- Montages collaborator
- Gary Hillberg
Why this life matters
Her pictures and moving-image collaborations construct narratives through performance, editing and carefully chosen settings.
Timeline
Key moments
Art-school graduation
Queensland College of Art.
Solo exhibition
Something More.
Venice presentation
My Horizon.
Art school and a collective setting
Born in Brisbane in 1960, Moffatt graduated from Queensland College of Art in 1982. In Sydney she helped establish Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative and worked with Anthony (Ace) Bourke on the NADOC ’86 photography exhibition.
Something More was commissioned by the Albury Regional Art Centre with support from Australian arts organisations. Its institutional setting matters alongside the artist’s individual authorship.
Photography and cinema together
Nice Coloured Girls preceded Night Cries and the feature Bedevil. International film-festival exposure developed alongside photographic series, rather than replacing them. Scarred for Life was followed by projects including Laudanum, Invocations and Spirit Landscapes.
Moffatt’s working life also became international. Frost describes her frequent New York visits during the 1980s and her eventual base there, alongside exhibitions in several countries.
Editing with Gary Hillberg
Moffatt collaborated with editor Gary Hillberg on the Montages works. Lip, Artist, Love and Doomed reorganised fragments of existing cinema into new sequences. Frost identifies the collaboration’s decade-long development and its inclusion in the 2012 MoMA retrospective of her moving-image work.
Sources for this section: [2]
A location becomes a fictional world
For My Horizon in 2017, curator Natalie King interviewed Moffatt about Passage and Body Remembers. Moffatt explained that she found locations and then developed characters and stories around them. She played the maid in Body Remembers, drawing partly on family history while creating a fiction.
The Venice presentation extended an international career already built through exhibitions and photographic series. Photography, filmmaking, self-performance and collaboration remained connected parts of that career.
Quick answers
Frequently asked questions about Tracey Moffatt
- Who collaborated on the Montages works?
- Gary Hillberg collaborated with Moffatt on the editing-based works.
Keep exploring
Lives connected to this story
- Gordon Parks
Continue with another working life and its linked study of creative practice.
- Jane Campion
Continue with another working life and its linked study of creative practice.
Sources and further reading
Explore the evidence
These references support the biography and offer further reading. Official records, first-person accounts and independent reporting provide different perspectives; image records document attribution and licensing.
- 1. National Portrait Gallery, Australia, updated 2021Tracey Moffatt
- 2. Andrew Frost, Design and Art Australia OnlineTracey Moffatt: biography
- 3. Natalie King, Ocula,1 September 2017Tracey Moffatt: conversation with Natalie King
This is an edited extract from Natalie King’s 2017 interview/book. It describes a staged fiction; the full book and videos were not consumed.
- 4. National Gallery of AustraliaTracey Moffatt: Know My Name
