Researcher

Dr Diana Baker Smith

Fields of Research (FoR)

Visual arts, Art history, theory and criticism, Screen and digital media, Performance art, Dance and dance studies

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Biography

I am an artist and Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales. My artistic practice is collaborative, research driven, and informed by feminist theory. Working at the intersection of performance and moving image, I develop new methodologies for critiquing art history. I am interested in the marginal histories of artists, and their relationship to art institutions and canonical histories. I utilise...view more

I am an artist and Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales. My artistic practice is collaborative, research driven, and informed by feminist theory. Working at the intersection of performance and moving image, I develop new methodologies for critiquing art history. I am interested in the marginal histories of artists, and their relationship to art institutions and canonical histories. I utilise collaborative approaches, archival research, oral records, fiction and feminist theory. 

I recently completed a series of works focused on the Australian artist, dancer, and choreographer, Philippa Cullen (1950-75), who was influential in Sydney during her lifetime, but has been consigned to two archival boxes held by the National Library, one of which has been misplaced. My recent exhibition at Artspace’s Ideas Platform, Tasks Yet to Be Composed for the Occasion, 2021, uses the remaining box, the memories of her peers, and re-enactment to consider her place within Australian art. It was developed in collaboration with dancer Brooke Stamp, artists Samuel Hodge and Ella Sutherland, and musicians Bree van Reyk and Miles Brown.

I am currently developing a trilogy of video essays about the origin myths of Australian art history in collaboration art historian Verónica Tello. The first work in this series, Opening Night (The Order of Arrangements), 2020, commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia, and screened at the Sydney Opera House in 2021, analyses how the origin stories of a national museum are reproduced through archives, art history and museum work.

I am also a founding member of the art collective Barbara Cleveland (formed in 2007 with Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley). Our works are held in the collections of Artbank, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Monash University Museum of Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the Art Gallery of NSW. In 2020 Barbara Cleveland’s survey exhibition, Thinking Business launched at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, and will tour nationally with Museums & Galleries NSW in 2021.


My Qualifications

  • PhD Art & Design: UNSW Art & Design, Sydney, March 2017.
  • Bachelor of Fine Arts: Time Based Art, UNSW, Sydney, May 2008.
  • Bachelor of Arts (Honours Class 1): Film Studies, UNSW, Sydney, May 2008.

My Research Supervision


Areas of supervision

As a contemporary artist and practice-led researcher, my expertise is in expanded practices of moving image, video art, installation and performance. As an artist-academic, I have also researched and published in the area of performance, choreography, re-enactment and artistic labour. 

I currently supervise a broad range of PhD and MFA students across artistic practice, curatorial studies and art history. I am interested in supervising students in the following areas:

  • Re-enactment and other methods of reanimating ephemeral art practices
  • Performance art, choreography, dance histories, concepts and practices
  • Moving image, video art histories and practices
  • Australian art histories, concepts, practices 
  • Time, archives, histories, futures – with a focus on feminist theories and practices (including memoir and auto-fiction) 
  • Marxist, feminist methodologies and theories 
  • Institutional critique 

Currently supervising

PhD

  • Teresa Hunter-Hicks (art theory/history) – Labour, Collaboration and Collectivity in Australian and North American Poster Collectives (1968-1991) (joint with Verónica Tello)
  • Jade Muratore, Time-Machine-Bodies : queering time and space toward posthuman becoming (joint with Rochelle Haley)
  • Giselle Stanborough, Linguistic and sensory-affective strategies of the voice and the digital in contemporary Performance Lecture (with Edward Scheer)

MFA

  • Evgenia (Jenny) Anagnostopoulou, Untitled (topic: curatorial experiments and the global souths) (joint with Verónica Tello) 
  • Lu Forsberg, Counter-Surveillance, Extractivism and Eco-Aesthetics (joint with Verónica Tello)
  • Amber Hammad, Speculative History and Critique of Gender in/out of Pakistan (joint with Verónica Tello)
  • Anney Bounpraseuth, Textiles/Memoir (joint with Verónica Tello) 
  • Amber Koroluk-Stephenson, Pictorial dichotomy in the landscape: painting, collage and pastiche in post-colonial myth making (with Grant Stevens)
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