Indigenous Advisory Group

Paola Balla

Paola is an award winning visual artist, highly commended curator and sought-after community cultural development practitioner, speaker, facilitator and writer. She is a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman and PhD candidate who lectures with Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Centre, Victoria University. She teaches Politics of Aboriginal Art, into the Masters of Teaching program and Indigenous Specialisations. Specialising in contemporary Indigenous art and Aboriginal women’s art and practices of resistance and revitalisation, Paola is a Lisa Bellear Post Graduate Research Scholar. She has over twenty years’ experience teaching Indigenous studies and contemporary Indigenous art practices, including in primary and secondary setting; education roles at the Botanic Gardens, Equal Opportunity Commission and Melbourne Museum as a Senior Curator in Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre; and co-founding the Indigenous Arts and Cultural Program at Footscray Community Arts Centre and Wominjeka Festival. Her current art and research focuses on black women’s art and activism, and its role in disrupting patriarchal and colonial dominant narratives and spaces.  Paola utilises art as sovereign act, in both process and outcome for expressing blak matriarchy and First Nations ways of ‘being, knowing and doing.’