About

Hayley Millar Baker (b. 1990) is a lens-based artist living and working in Narrm (Melbourne), Australia.

Hayley’s work is rooted in her Aboriginal heritage, belonging to the Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung peoples through her mother’s side, and Anglo-Indian and Portuguese-Brazilian ancestry on her father’s side. Her perspective is shaped by this mix of cultural influences, which underpins her practice in Aboriginal resilience, ancestral empowerment, and a critical examination of the forces that continue to influence and impact First Nations communities.

Drawing on ancestral knowledge, mythology, and philosophies of being, Hayley explores the tangible and the spectral. Through photographic collage, film, and video, she constructs visual narratives that immerse viewers in the emotional and psychological landscapes of Aboriginal people, articulated through a female perspective. Her photographic practice is consistently politically engaged, informed by historical and contemporary violences. Whether depicting landscapes, portraiture, or forms in between, her works seek to rewrite narratives and assert a stance, challenging external representations and affirming agency. Across all mediums, her work highlights cultural, spiritual, and emotional dimensions, inviting reflection on endurance, presence, and continuity.

Hayley’s moving-image practice follows two paths. Her films unfold narratively, drawing viewers into immersive cinematic worlds, while her video works hold space, emphasising presence, duration, and performance. The depth, strength, and agency of the figures in her work underscore their vital role in sustaining balance. Rooted in a cyclical understanding of life and death, and informed by ritual and transformation, her practice engages with Aboriginal worlds and the political forces that continue to shape them.

Deliberate obfuscation defines Hayley’s approach, alternately concealing and revealing, challenging perception and encouraging reflection on endurance, being, and spiritual continuity. This method mirrors the ongoing process of understanding life and relational worlds. It invites contemplation of Aboriginal experience, acts of resistance, and the reclamation of matriarchal knowledge and traditions. Her work is both a reclamation and a celebration of the power, agency, and profound connection womxn hold with their ancestral and spiritual inheritance in a world shaped by colonial violence.

“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 many major group and solo exhibitions, both locally and globally. These include esteemed institutions including 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 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, UAE), 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).

Hayley has also received significant commissions from prestigious institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia, RISING: Melbourne, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), PHOTO2021: International Festival of Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia), and the International Ballarat Foto Biennale.

Hayley has received numerous respected awards and accolades, including the National Photography Prize’s John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship, the Darebin Art Prize, and the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize’s Special Commendation. She was shortlisted for the Australian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale with curator Erin Vink and has been a finalist in prestigious national awards, including the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Ramsay Art Prize, UNSW’s John Fries Award, the Bowness Photography Prize, and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. Internationally, she has been a finalist in Venice’s Arte Laguna Prize, the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in Hong Kong, and the Vantage Point Sharjah in the UAE.

Her notable residencies include the Georges Mora Fellowship, DESA Artist-in-Residence in Ubud, Bali; the Gertrude Contemporary studio residency; artist-in-residence at Monash University in Prato, Italy; the Photography Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria; and artist-in-residence at The Substation.

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