Dr Janine Burke

Honorary Senior Fellow
Victorian College of the Arts


Janine Burke is an Honorary Senior Fellow, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. An art historian, curator, novelist and photographer, she has published 20 books. In 1975, she curated Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940 at the George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne. The resulting book remains a standard text in Australian art. Also in the 1970s, Dr Burke co-founded the Victorian Women’s Art Movement and Lip, the feminist arts journal. From 1977-1982, she was the foundation art history lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts. Her novel Second Sight won the 1987 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. While a trustee of Heide Museum of Modern Art, she wrote books and curated exhibitions on the Heide modernist circle including Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (1994), Joy Hester (revised and republished 2001), Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002) and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (2004). Janine published The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection (2006) and in 2014 curated Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing for the Freud Museum London. More recently, her practice has focused on nature. Her book and curatorial projects have included Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing (2009) Nest: The Art of Birds (2012) and the exhibition Human/Animal/Artist: Art Inspired by Animals (2014). Her photographs are held in the collections of Heide Museum of Modern Art, Monash University Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Australia Research Library. Currently, she is writing a cultural history of trees.

Image Credit: David Sheehy

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