Dr. Elisa Decourcy

Biography

Elisa deCourcy is a researcher and curator based in Ngunnawal Ngambri Country. From 2020 to 2023, she held the prestigious Australian Research Council Fellowship for her project 'Capturing Foundational Australian Photography in a Globalising World' (DE200101322). This DECRA project focused on the arrival photography in Australian colonies and the technology experienced during the mid-nineteenth century. Her work involved comprehensive archival research across 70 national and international collections, along with practice-led investigations in consultation with Indigenous communities about colonial photography and art. In July 2023, she convened the symposium 'Nineteenth-Century Worlds in Vision', co-hosted by the Australian National University and the National Portrait Gallery. DeCourcy collaborated with contemporary artists James Tylor and Craig Tuffin through the Research School of Physics to create a series of daguerreotype photographs that utilize historic processes, which are now part of the collections at the National Portrait Gallery in Kamberri/Canberra and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Her monograph, 'Early Photography in Colonial Australia', was published by Miegunyah/Melbourne University Press in October 2025. Elisa has been awarded fellowships for her invited lectures at esteemed institutions such as the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the Australian Academy of Humanities, the Bibliotheca Hertziana at the Max Planck Institute of Art History in Rome, and the University of Oxford.

Research Interests