ARETHA BROWN - PAINTER / SCREENWRITER / PRODUCER
Born 2000, Melbourne, VIC
Aretha Brown is a Gumbaynggirr artist, screenwriter, and cultural advocate whose multidisciplinary practice reclaims Aboriginal historiography through a visually striking, politically driven, and culturally future-facing lens. Moving fluidly across mural painting, drawing, screenwriting, performance, and graphic design, Brown explores the pressures placed on First Nations storytellers while insisting on joy, humour, and experimentation as forms of resistance.
At 25, Brown is one of the youngest artists ever selected for the National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, exhibiting in ‘AFTER THE RAIN’, curated by Tony Albert. She opens the 5th National Triennial with a 35-metre long mural reframing the colonisation of Australia through an Aboriginal perspective that has long been overwritten in the nation’s memory. Brown also designed the complete visual identity for the exhibition, demonstrating her ability to expand her practice beyond the gallery walls into sophisticated, award-winning design work.
In 2025, Brown debuted her new body of work, ‘Bedazzled’, in Tokyo, Japan. Playful, maximalist, and defiantly sparkly, the series is a celebration of Blak Joy—positioning joy and lightness as radical, political acts in a society that often demands seriousness and heaviness from First Nations artists. Bedazzled asserts joy as rebellion, reclaiming Indigenous art as contemporary, diverse, humorous, explorative, and proudly interrogative. These thematic explorations—joy, futurity, resistance, and cultural reframing—have become central to Brown’s practice in recent years.
Brown’s work extends across music, fashion, and cultural collaboration. She has created art for Amyl and the Sniffers (2023), Belfast rap group Kneecap (2025), The Kid Laroi (2025), and Emma Donovan, while partnering with Volley Australia (2025), Converse, Puma, Greenpeace, and more. Her influence across art and youth culture has been profiled in Vogue Australia multiple times, and widely across numerous national media outlets.
She first rose to prominence as a youth activist after delivering landmark speeches at the 2017 and 2018 Invasion Day rallies in Naarm/Melbourne, addressing crowds of over 50,000 people. She was later elected Prime Minister of the National Indigenous Youth Parliament — the youngest and first woman to hold the role. Brown is a sought-after public speaker, with appearances at Tate Modern (London), University of the Arts (London), Sydney Opera House’s All About Women Festival, Broadside Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival, and national broadcast media.
As a visual artist, Brown has exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria (twice), West Space, the Australian National University, and the University of Melbourne. In 2019 she founded **Kiss My Art, a mural collective responsible for more than 70 public artworks across Australia, Japan, the UK, India, East Timor, Indonesia, the USA, and Canada, supporting young women and non-binary artists through employment and community-led public art. Her design work for LL Gurrowa earned two Gold NZ Design Awards, cementing her as a creative force on an international level.
Brown's screen career continues to grow, as she writes and directs across animation, documentary and comedy; with credits including A Story About Love (2025), Yilii (2025) and How To Be Cool in Melbourne (2021). Her art has also been featured throughout Netflix’s Heartbreak High Season 2. Her debut short film, How to Be Cool in Melbourne, examines the politics of the city’s cultural underground; themes that are further explored and developed through her upcoming screenplay, ‘Shamejob’, expanding her deep interest in humour, identity, and Blak urban life.
Across her art, design, writing, and public life, Aretha Brown represents a new generation of Blak cultural leadership—fearless, inventive, and committed to reshaping how Australia understands its past, celebrates its present, and imagines its futures.
photos: @s1mkaur & @sub_lation