Hayley Millar Baker (b. 1990, Melbourne) is a Gunditjmara, Djab Wurrung, Nira Balluk Taungurung and Anglo-Indian artist working across photography, collage, moving image, and installation. Over the past decade, she has developed a distinctive lens-based practice grounded in Aboriginal understandings of relationality.

Millar Baker's work is deeply concerned with the ethics of looking. Through fragmentation, reconstruction, concealment, and revelation, she resists demands for immediate recognition and fixed interpretation, asking viewers to slow down, listen, and consider what exists beyond visibility. As Arrernte and Kalkadoon curator Hetti Perkins writes, Millar Baker's "encrypted images purposefully elude easy categorisation or typecasting," and, "in much the same way, the lives of contemporary Aboriginal people resist stereotyping or pigeonholing." Curator Erin Vink extends this reading, identifying in her practice "a sustained inquiry into the limits of lens-based legibility," where "meaning resides not in the visible but in what lies beyond, what Derrida calls the trace," and where Millar Baker's privileging of "opacity in Glissant's sense... foregrounds the instability of seeing."

This instability is not incidental but purposeful. Millar Baker treats the 'image' as an active encounter, one in which past, present, and future coexist as fluid, non-linear time, and from within it, she enacts a sustained act of rematriation. As author, Millar Baker recentres Aboriginal women as matriarchs and knowledge keepers, their authority rooted in an inherent wisdom and intuition. In doing so, her practice challenges Western conventions of looking, developing forms of seeing rooted in Aboriginal kinship, where life and death, absence and presence, are held as connected rather than opposed.

This reclamation extends to genre itself. In film works including Nyctinasty, The Umbra, and Eternity the Butterfly, Millar Baker draws on the visual and atmospheric language of horror and slow cinema, without inheriting the genre's aim to terrify. In her hands, this atmosphere becomes a means of asserting Indigenous female sovereignty instead.

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.

Most recently, in 2025, Millar Baker was shortlisted for the Australian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale with curator Erin Vink, and in 2026 she received the Creative Australia First Nations Arts and Culture Award for Youth Achievement in the Arts. 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.