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). 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 deep archival research in over 70 national and internaitonal collections with practice-led investigation and consultation with First Nations Communities on heritage collections of colonial photography and colonial art.

As part of this project, she convened 'Nineteenth-Century Worlds of Vision' symposium co-hosted between the Australian Naitonal University and the National Portrait Gallery in July 2023. She worked with contemporary artists, James Tylor and Craig Tuffin, in conjunction with the Research School of Physics, ANU and Photo Access, Canberra, to make a series of daguerreotype photographs, following historic processes. Photographs of this series have been collected by the National Portrait Gallery, Kamberri/Canberra and the Naitonal Portrait Gallery London. Her monograph, Early Photography in Colonial Australia, supported by her DECRA, was published by Miegunyah/Melbourne University Press in October 2025.

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 Planck 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, the National Gallery of Victoria, Naarm/Melbourne and the Powerhouse Museum, Gadigal Nura/Sydney, as well as a range of national and international scholarly journals.   

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.