Amala Groom is a full-time Wiradyuri conceptual arts and cultural practitioner. Based on her mother’s Wiradyuri country in Kelso in regional NSW, she employs a Wiradyuri-based ontology and embodied research-based methodology that considers traditional cultural practice and academia with formal research as a whole-of-person approach as both inquiry and investigation in the actual and literal sense.

Groom’s work proactively seeks to dismantle the Colonial Project by asserting the argument that colonialism is not just disadvantageous for First Peoples but is, in fact, antithetical to the human experience.

Groom’s background is in advocating for First Peoples’ rights and freedoms spending five years at United Nations fora in New York and Geneva, as the Chamber 3 Female Director with the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples (2016) and as the first identified ATSI Director on the NAVA Board (2017-19).

She is an award-winning artist with a dynamic conceptual oeuvre traversing a plethora of media. Her work sits at the forefront of emerging and experimental practice that pushes boundaries both thematically and through form. Often through the lens of self-portraiture, her practice explores complex issues around identity, sovereignty, history, politics, culture, and spirituality. Her work is intelligent and bold, confronting us with questions of identity while renegotiating what we had been taking for granted as familiar. She uses her body as well as ideas, objects, and collaborators to ask those questions in new ways.

Selected appointments include Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture; The University of Sydney: Nicholas and Angela Curtis Cité Internationale des Arts Residency Fellowship (2024); Create NSW First Nations Creative Fellowship w/ State Library of NSW (2022-24); University of Technology Sydney: Inaugural Artist in Residence Program (2021).

Groom’s work is held by Artbank; Blacktown City Art Collection; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre; Charles Sturt University; Deutsche Bank; and Western Sydney University.