Hayley Millar Baker (b. 1990, Melbourne) is a Gunditjmara, Djab Wurrung, Nira Balluk Taungurung and Anglo-Indian artist working across photographic collage, film, moving image and installation. Her practice is grounded in storytelling, creating and recreating narratives to tell, retell and disrupt stories across history, lived experience and the spiritual realm. Her work moves between the personal and the political, where intimate stories carry the weight of broader histories of colonialism, survival and resistance.

Grounded in Indigenous understandings of relationality, Millar Baker’s work considers the relationships between people, land, time, spirituality, life and death. Drawing from historical records, personal experience, performance, embodied experience and cinematic language, she creates works where different histories, temporalities and realities coexist. Storytelling becomes a way of revisiting what has been recorded, reclaiming what has been obscured and imagining what might otherwise remain unseen.

Millar Baker resists the expectation that images should offer immediate recognition or fixed interpretation. Through concealment, obfuscation and revelation, she considers what exists beyond visibility and who determines what can be seen, known and believed. Her work treats the image not as a neutral form of representation, but as an active encounter through which histories continue, ancestral presences endure and other realities become possible.

Since her inclusion in Primavera: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 2018, Millar Baker's work has been presented in major exhibitions nationally and internationally, including at the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and e-flux, New York.

Recent presentations include the 2026 Biennale de Lyon, MACLyon; Dark Mofo, Tasmania; La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA), Montréal; and No Spectacular Soul, a major institutional solo exhibition at Artspace, Sydney. In 2026, she received the Creative Australia First Nations Arts and Culture Award for Youth Achievement in the Arts, and in 2025 was shortlisted for the Australian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale with curator Erin Vink.

Her work is held in major public collections throughout Australia and internationally, including the National Gallery of Victoria, National Portrait Gallery, Australian War Memorial, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Monash University Museum of Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and MoCA Cultural Association, Venice.