Lizzie Muller is Director of Research in the School of Art & Design. She is a curator and researcher specialising in audience experience and interdisciplinary collaboration. She researches the future of museums as sites of knowledge production. Her recent book Curating Lively Objects: Exhibitions Beyond Disciplines (co-authored with Caroline Seck-Langill) demonstrates how curating drives museum innovation. Lizzie is an elected Councillor of the Sydney Culture Network , and co-founder with Keir Winesmith of the bi-monthly Sydney Culture Data Salon.

Lizzie’s research draws together curatorial practice with theories and methods from participatory design and interaction design. She has developed audience-centred curatorial methodologies and innovative approaches to audience research. Her work with audience experience extends to the fields of preservation and archiving, particularly experiential documentation and oral histories of media art. 

Major exhibitions

Lizzie's international exhibitions celebrate the intersection of art, science and technology. In In 2018/19 she co-curated the exhibition Human Non Human with Katie Dyer at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. The show includes four commissions that speculate on human futures through the themes of food, work, sex and belief. Each work explores the entanglement of humans with non human agents and actors, including bees, jelly, data and buildings. The exhibition includes an experimental interactive digital catalogue that maps the interconnection of themes and ideas in the show: http://human-non-human.info/

In 2017/18 Lizzie co-curated (with Holly Williams) A Working Model of the World – an exhibition exploring the role of models in creating and sharing knowledge across all disciplines. The exhibition was staged in UNSW Galleries (May-July 2017), the Sheila C Johnson Design Centre, Parsons, The New School, New York (Sep-Dec 2017) and LifeSpace at the University of Dundee (June-Sep 2018).

Previous curatorial projects include Lively Objects at the Museum of Vancouver with Caroline Langill (2015); Awfully Wonderful: Science Fiction in Contemporary Art curated with Bec Dean at Sydney’s Performance Space (2011); The Art of Participatory Design, with Lian Loke, a programme of creative research projects that accompanied the 2010 International Conference of Participatory Design for which she was Art Chair; Mirror States, a major exhibition of interactive installations, curated with Kathy Cleland (Campbelltown Art Gallery, Sydney and MIC Toi Rerehiko, Auckland, 2008). In 2008 Lizzie was curator and co-director (with George Khut) of the year-long interdisciplinary research project Thinking Through the Body funded by the Australia Council’s ArtLab. Between 2004-2006 Lizzie was founding curator of Beta_space; a dedicated venue for exhibiting “prototypes” of interactive artworks at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

Fellowships

In 2013 Lizzie was Visiting Fellow at the University of Westminster, London and in 2009 she was Visiting Fellow at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Media.Art.Research, Linz. In 2007 she was researcher in residence at the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal.