Diana Baker Smith is an artist based on Gadigal land in Sydney. Her practice is grounded in feminist methodologies and collaborative processes, activating embodied and affective responses to historical materials through performance and moving image. Positioning herself as an artist-as-historian, Baker Smith engages with sites, archives, and institutional histories to reimagine what is remembered, forgotten, or deliberately obscured.
Recent solo exhibitions and commissions include This Place Where They Dwell (Penrith Regional Gallery, 2024), Falling Towards Another (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2024), and A Score for Reconstruction (Newcastle Art Gallery, 2024). Her work has been presented in group exhibitions including Photosynthesisers: Women and the Lens (Te Uru, Auckland, 2025), Circles of Dialogue (La Trobe Art Institute, 2023), Video Commission (Ngununggula, 2022), Know My Name: Australian Women Artists (National Gallery of Australia, 2021), All About Women in Film (Sydney Opera House, 2020), Australia: Antipodean Stories (Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 2019), Divided Worlds: Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2018), Channels Video Art Festival (National Gallery of Victoria, 2018), Unboxed, Artists and the Archive (Hayward Gallery, London, 2017), and The Future is Already Here – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed (20th Biennale of Sydney, 2016).
Her solo and collaborative works with the art collective Barbara Cleveland are held in institutional collections including Artbank, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Monash University Museum of Art, and UTS Art Gallery. Most recently, she was awarded the 2025 Major Acquisitive Gosford Art Prize, and in 2024 she received the Judy Wheeler Commission at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Baker Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at the School of Art & Design, UNSW Sydney.
Contact
mail@dianabakersmith.com