About

Hayley Millar Baker (b. 1990) is an artist based in Narrm (Melbourne), Australia.

Hayley’s practice is grounded in her Aboriginal heritage, belonging to the Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung peoples through her mother, and in Anglo-Indian and Portuguese-Brazilian ancestry through her father. This layered cultural background shapes her perspective and informs work that explores Aboriginal knowledge, relationality, and resilience while critically examining the forces that continue to affect First Nations communities.

Drawing on ancestral knowledge, mythology, and philosophies of being, her work reflects the stories, cosmologies, and symbolic frameworks that inform Aboriginal worlds. Hayley creates spaces for reflection, reclamation, and connection that engage psychological, spiritual, bodily, and environmental dimensions. Deliberate obfuscation characterises her approach, alternately concealing and revealing, challenging perception and inviting contemplation of endurance, presence, and spiritual continuity. Through this perspective, audiences experience cycles of relationality and continuity, witnessing the intertwined presence of body, spirit, and land. Her practice affirms the vitality of Aboriginal culture and its capacity to sustain transformation, connection, and agency despite colonial legacies.

Working across photography, film, and video, Hayley’s practice examines historical and contemporary violences while reshaping narratives through immersive emotional and psychological landscapes. Central to her work is the perspective of Aboriginal women, whose strength, insight, and presence are vital to sustaining cultural and spiritual knowledge. Guided by Aboriginal philosophies, ritual, and ancestral memory, her work embodies the interconnectedness of body, land, and spirit.

Her practice operates as both reclamation and authorship, restoring matriarchal knowledge, ancestral memory, and spiritual inheritance while honouring women as custodians of culture, land, and spirit. Hayley Millar Baker’s work is politically engaged, spiritually resonant, and deeply human, revealing the cyclical, interconnected, and regenerative nature of Aboriginal worlds.

“Millar Baker’s encrypted images purposefully elude easy categorisation. They are cinematic, documentary, archival, and surreal still-lifes that resist a narrow view of what it means to live as an Aboriginal person in Australia.”

– Hetti Perkins, curator, cultural adviser, writer, and activist.

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“Millar Baker’s practice demonstrates a sustained inquiry into the limits of lens-based legibility, oscillating between excision and exposure strategies. Her atmospheric, unsettling images insist that meaning resides not in the visible but in what lies beyond—what Derrida calls the trace—where light and shadow, presence and absence, unsettle perception itself. By privileging opacity in Glissant's sense, she foregrounds the instability of seeing, reminding us that history emerges only in fragments, and that the present in her scenes is intentionally veiled.”

- Erin Vink, Senior Curator, First Nations Art (Local and Global), Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Hayley’s work has been prominently featured in numerous major group and solo exhibitions both locally and internationally. These exhibitions include esteemed institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) (Sydney), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) (Melbourne), Australian War Memorial (Canberra), Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (North Carolina, USA), Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide), Melbourne Museum (Melbourne), Fremantle Arts Centre (Fremantle), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne), Chau Chak Wing Museum (Sydney), Al Hamriyah Studios (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates), Artspace Sydney (Sydney), UQ Art Museum (Brisbane), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), SAMSTAG Museum (Adelaide), MUMA (Melbourne), Salamanca Arts Centre (Hobart), Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery (Broken Hill), Flinders Street Ballroom (Melbourne), Shepparton Art Museum (Shepparton), Ballarat Art Gallery (Ballarat), FUMA Gallery (Adelaide), ACE Open (Adelaide), The Substation (Melbourne), MAMA (Albury), and UNSW Gallery (Sydney).

Throughout her career, Hayley has received numerous prestigious awards and accolades, such as the National Photography Prize’s John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship in 2020, the Darebin Art Prize in 2019, and the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize’s Special Commendation in 2017. She has also been a finalist in notable national awards, including the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Ramsay Art Prize in 2019 and 2021, the Bowness Photography Prize in 2021, UNSW’s John Fries Award in 2018, and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award in 2018. On the international stage, she has been a finalist in Venice’s Arte Laguna Prize in 2021, the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in Hong Kong in 2021, and Vantage Point Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates in 2021.

She was shortlisted for the Australian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, in collaboration with curator Erin Vink. She was selected as one of eight artists for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) Primavera: Young Australian Artists in 2018.

Hayley Millar Baker is represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.