Dr Paola Balla

Dr Paola Balla is a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara artist, curator, writer, and academic whose projects focus on Aboriginal women’s stories, resistance, voices, activism, sovereignty and matriarchy.

Balla’s visual practice engages with the impacts of colonial racism and trauma on Blak women’s bodies and encapsulates memory and narrative in photography and installation through practice led research.

Paola was part of the Blak Brow editorial for the Blak Women’s Edition of the Lifted Brow, 2018 & co-curated Sovereignty (2016) and Unfinished Business; Perspectives on Art & Feminism (2017) at ACCA. Paola is based at Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Unit, Victoria University, Footscray.

Wominjeka (Welcome). We acknowledge the Yaluk-ut Weelam as the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet. Yaluk-ut Weelam means ‘people of the river camp’ and is connected with the coastal land at the head of Port Phillip Bay, extending from the Werribee River to Mordialloc. The Yaluk-ut Weelam are part of the Boon Wurrung, one of the five major language groups of the greater Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to the land, their ancestors and their elders—past, present and to the future.