Former Dean of UNSW | Art & Design, Professor Harley AM is an award-winning artist, writer and educator whose career crosses the bounds of traditional and creative arts research. His video and sound work has been presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, New York MoMA, Ars Electronica in Austria, the Biennale of Sydney, and at the Sydney Opera House.

He was Managing Editor then Editor of the journal Art + Text (1986-91), and has written regular columns on design and popular culture for Rolling Stone and for The Australian national newspaper. He has edited a number of anthologies, including New Media Technologies (1993), Artists in Cyberculture (1993) and Before and After Cinema (1999). Another, entitled Parallel Histories in the Intermedia Age appeared in the Summer of 2000. In 1992 he was the director of the influential International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and returned as Co-Chair of ISEA 2013.

He is also well-known for directing the audio/vision for the Cardoso Flea Circus videos and live performances with Colombian-born artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso. Collaborative work includes Aviopolis (with Gillian Fuller), a multimedia project and book about airports, Black Dog Publications, London; Busface, a photo-media installation with the Ejecutivo Colectivo exhibited at ArtBasel, Miami; and the DVD installation Cloudscope in collaboration with Durbach | Block architects at Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney; and the Museum of Copulatory Organs with Maria Fernanda Cardoso at the 18^th Biennale of Sydney.

Collaborative research projects include the ARC funded "Reconsidering Australian Media Art Histories in an International Context" and “Scanlines: Video Art in Australia Since the 1960s”, an ARC linkage project investigating the history of video art in Sydney partnering with, dLux Media Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; “Airportals”, a multichannel video of personal airflights and itineraries (with Leo Martyn animator); and “Loomorama“,  a collaborative installation project with Elvis Richardson based on personal archives of VHS tapes and VJ presentation tools. He is also Lead Chief Investigator on the ARC LIEF project Design and Art of Australia Online together with DAAO Research Director and long-time collaborator Gillian Fuller.

He was Head of School Media Arts UNSW (2009-13), Deputy Director at the National Institute for Experimental Arts [NIEA] and Co-Director of the ICinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research until 2013. A Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, he was awarded a Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2008, and became Dean of UNSW ART & Design in 2013.

A Director on the Board of NIDA (2017-20),  UNSW Chair of Arts & Culture (2017-20), Chair of Create NSW Multi-arts Board (2019-24) and Chair of the Sydney Culture Network (2017-24), he was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to education and the arts in 2024.

Funded Research Projects

• Chief Investigator, ARC Linkage Project, "Digitising the Kaldor Public Art Projects Archive", 2018-2020.
• Chief Investigator, ARC Linkage Project, "Heritage of the Air: how aviation transformed Australia", 2018-2021.
• Lead Chief Investigator, ARC LIEF Grant, “Design and Art Australia Online: Sustainable Data Sharing for Australian researchers and collections”, 2013-14. 
• Chief Investigator, “Building Distributed Leadership for Effective Supervision of Creative Practice Higher Research Degrees”, (Office for Learning and Teaching —  Leadership for Excellence in Learning and Teaching grant), 2012-13. 
• Chief Investigator, “The Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) Virtual Laboratory”, (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources grant), 2011-13.
• Lead Chief Investigator, ARC LIEF Grant, “Design and Art of Australia Online”, 2012-13. 
• Chief Investigator, ARC Linkage Project, “iLetter: Reformulating War Memory as a Dialogical Interactive Narrative”, 2011-2014. 
• Lead Chief Investigator, ARC Linkage Grant, “Reconsidering Australian Media Arts History in an International Context”, in partnership with ANAT and Donau University, Austria, 2011-13. 
• Lead Chief Investigator, ARC LIEF Grant, “Design and Art of Australia Online”, 2010-11.
• Lead Chief Investigator, ARC Linkage Grant, "Video Art Online", in partnership with dLux Media Arts and MCA Sydney, 2008-2011.
• Goldstar Research Award, “Aviopolis”, University of New South Wales, 2001.