Biography

Associate Professor Marnie Badham

 With 30 years of experience of art and social justice in Australia and Canada, Marnie’s creative and critical research sits at the intersection of socially engaged art practice, participatory methodologies, and the politics of cultural measurement. Through dialogic forms for encounter and exchange with attention to relational ethics and care, Marnie’s community partnerships bring together disparate groups of people (artists, communities, industry, government) in dialogue to examine and effect local issues. Her art and social practice research is co-created with long term collaborators in the context of Indigenous-settler-migrant relations, food-art-politics, affective engagement in relation to climate anxiety, and creative cartographies through durational artist residencies. 

• With Gunditjmara artist Vicki Couzens, Marnie has co-creates community projects focused on developing ethical cultural frameworks: Listening to Country, Listening to Community: towards a co-created framework of people and place-based value and values for the Dandenong Creek Art Trail (2020-22); Sharing Oral Knowledge with Genevieve Grieves and GARUWA (2023-24); and with Jody Haines The Power That We Have… Listen Up! (2020) and Revisiting the Possum Skin Cloaks (2019) films.

• She curates and performs on the aesthetics and politics of food: Mapping Migratory Meals at the End of the World (MMMEOW) with Stephen Loo, Poppy de Souza and Samid Suliman for the Mapping Futures Imaginary Labs (2023, Melbourne); ‘Why is the River Laughing?’ with the Lost Klong Collective, Bangkok International Design Week (2022, Thailand), The Sounds of Justice are Music to My Mouth with Madeline Collie and Stephen Loo for Liquid Architecture (2021), and Bruised Food: a living laboratory with Francis Maravillas hosting Asian and Australian artists Elia Nurvista, Stephen Loo, Rhett D’Costa, Keg de Souza, and Arahamaiani in experimental residencies at RMIT Gallery (2019).

• Marnie has co-developed a series of participatory works in relation to climate anxiety including To the Fallen Trees… performance in the for the Big Anxiety Festival (Dandenong Ranges, 2022); a photo/sound installation for Design Hub Gallery, RMIT (Melbourne, 2023) with Tammy Wong Hulbert, Ai Yamamoto, George Akl and local collaborators; and Invisible Winds, Climarte Gallery (Richmond, 2023).

• Through artist-researcher residency formats, she has conceived a series of durational creative cartographies registering emotion in public space Five Weeks in Spring: an emotional map of Lilydale at Yarra Ranges Gallery (2018) and Pedestrian Poetics for Public Space (2020-2021) for Dancing Place: Corhanwarrabul with Tammy Wong Hulbert, and EmpowerHER: a women’s map to the city with Emily Dundas Oke and Will Garrett Petts with the United Way (Kamloops, Canada, 2018).

Marnie is a Chief Investigator for the Australian Research Council Linkage Project award Ambitious and Fair: towards a sustainable visual arts sector and contributes to policy and industry standards on artist fees, public art commissioning, artist residencies, and arts funding. Marnie serves as research mentor within multiple community partnerships: All The Queens Men’s Coming Back Out Ball and the Elders Dance Club (2019, 2020, 2022, 2023) with LGTBQIA+ seniors, the Indigenous Traditional Dance Project (2018) with ArtBack NT in Borroloola, and Ngamumu: decolonising motherhood with Lia Pa’apa’a (2021).  

Marnie is Associate Professor, School of Art, RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She is a director for Res Artis: global network of artist residencies, co-leads the Cultural Value Impact Network (CVIN), and is a member of CAST (contemporary art and social transformation) research group. She has a PhD in Creative Arts and Cultural Policy (University of Melbourne, 2012), a Masters of Community Cultural Development (University of Melbourne, 2008) and undergraduate degrees: Bachelor of Fine Arts, Inter-media and Bachelor of Arts, Art History (University of Regina, 1996 & 1996).