Fiona Foley

Activist, curator, writer, painter, printmaker, photographer, sculptor and installation artist Fiona Foley (1964) is a Badtjala woman from Fraser Island, Queensland. Foley in 1987 was a founding member of Boomalli Aboriginal Arts Cooperative in Sydney along with other prominent and politically active Aboriginal artists including Euphemia Bostock, Michael Riley, Tracey Moffatt, Jeffrey Samuels, Bronwyn Bancroft, Avril Quaill, Fern Martens, Arone Meeks and Brenda L. Croft.

Foley graduated from East Sydney Technical College with a Certificate in Art in 1983. In 1986 she received a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts and in 1987 Foley gained a Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney.

Foley has been exhibiting since the mid-1980s and has had her work shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Australia and overseas. In 2009–2010 the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane and the MCA, Sydney co-curated a survey exhibition of Foley’s work titled Forbidden. Her commissioned public art can be found in major cultural sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane. Foley is represented in a number of public and private collections nationally and internationally.