Dr Elisa deCourcy

Dr Elisa deCourcy is a writer and curator based on Nguannawal and Ngambri Country. Between 2020-2023 she held a prestigious Australian Research Council Fellowship ‘Capturing Foundational Australian Photography in a Globalising World’ (DE200101322/$343,526AUD). Her DECRA project reconsidered the arrival of photography to the Australian colonies and how the technology was experienced during its mid-nineteenth-century decades of practice. It combined archival research, practice-led investigation and consultation with First Nations Communities on heritage collections of colonial photography and colonial art.

Elisa has been the recipient of fellowships from, and given invited lectures at, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas (2018); the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2018); the Bibliotheca Hertziana Max Plank Institute of Art History, Rome (2023) and the University of Oxford (2023). She has written about photography and colonial art for the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris and the National Gallery of Victoria, Naarm/Melbourne, as well as a range of national and international scholarly journals. Her monograph, Early Photography in Colonial Australia, will be published by Miegunyah/Melbourne University Press in October 2025.   

BA (Hons. I) PhD

History of photography (19th and 20th century); nineteeth-century colonial art (south Pacific focus); archives and colonial knowledge; art and museum practices and decolonisation.