Curatorial theorist, researcher and waterist

Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris thinks with water.

She is an Australian and Swedish curator, writer and lecturer based on Darug and Gundungurra Country, Blue Mountains. Her expertise is on the poetics and politics of eco-aesthetics and curatorial theory with a focus on water, environmental art and hydrofeminism. Her work navigates fluid territories through her academic work, curatorial theory and independent curatorial practice, which spans the Nordic and Oceanic contexts. Her work seeks to address the climate crisis through creative practice, theory making and pedagogy.

Her work charts new ways of seeing water's currents across aesthetic, cultural, and computational landscapes. Based in the Blue Mountains on Dharug and Gundungurra Ngurra (Country), she is Senior Research Associate at UNSW as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).

Her research proposing the Hydrocene as a disruptive epoch and curatorial theory is internationally recognised and is the focus of her monograph on art, climate and eco-aesthetics, titled The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water (Routledge, Environmental Humanities Series 2024).

Bronwyn was previously EC Research Fellow at UNSW Art and Design, as well as Curator for the nation-wide Climate Aware Creative Practices Network. Living in Sweden for ten years, she was Curator at Index Foundation, Stockholm and lead of Art+Research at Accelerator, Stockholm University, and has curated exhibitions internationally including in Sydney, Melbourne, Madrid and Stockholm. She now maintains an independent curatorial practice, most recently curating Lithic Bodies at UNSW Galleries, Sydney and Relational Ecologies at ACCA, Melbourne.

Her latest voyage: The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water (Routledge, 2024).