Professor Dr. Rebecca Shanahan

Biography

Rebecca Shanahan is a lecturer at the University of New South Wales in the School of Art & Design. She is an artist academically trained in fine art photography and has a lifelong practice incorporating textiles. Her teaching and artistic practice are multi-disciplinary, encompassing performance, video, and installation. Shanahan's work is deeply informed by frameworks of social, feminist, and political critique, making visible the unpaid labor of women and interrogating the primary value systems of the market. She explores liminal spaces of art activism and has a longstanding inquiry into materiality, trace, transience, and the emotional registers of distance and intimacy between public and private states. Shanahan has exhibited widely across Australia and Aotearoa for decades, participated in artist residencies, and has been a finalist for various juried awards and prizes. With expertise particularly in analogue photography, she has taught across a diverse range of conceptually-led areas.

Research Interests