About

Grace Pundyk is an artist, curator, author, choreographer, playwright and scholar based in Melbourne, Australia, and living on the lands of the Bunurong and Wurundjeri. Her practice – both artistic and research – is interdisciplinary, often journey-inspired, and seeks to blur the boundaries of identity, belonging, death and the beyond through ritual and an honouring of the natural environment.

Grace undertook her doctoral research at the Centre for Ideas, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her PhD, in Interdisciplinary Arts and Philosophy, explored the impacts of intergenerational trauma and silenced memory through both scholarly and creative practice-based research.

Grace’s current project, Heirloom, was borne of this doctoral investigation and is an ongoing series of textile-based works that celebrates the generativity of herstories and the ephemeral wild. Her Heirloom headpieces continue to be exhibited in galleries and festivals and, in 2022, featured in a major dance work with MADE dance company in Tasmania, for which Grace was artistic director, choreographer and sound designer.

You can learn more about the story behind Heirloom in Garland Magazine.

Other works include books - The Honey Trail (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), and Sons of Sindbad: the photographs (Arabian Publishing, London, 2006); her play Steppe, which was short-listed for the 2016 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award and has been translated into Polish and Spanish; and her work with skin/parchment for which she undertook a mentorship in New York with professional parchment makers, Pergamena.

In 2023, Grace’s photo series ‘Continuum was awarded ‘Gold’ in the Analog Sparks photography awards.

Grace is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for European Studies, Australian National University.