Jennifer Martiniello is an award winning poet, writer, visual artist and academic of Arrernte, Chinese and Anglo-Celtic descent. Her father was Richard Longmore (1914-1985), born Richard Chong at Oodnadatta, South Australia. Martiniello spent a period in the Australian navy and has lectured in various areas of education at the Canberra Institute of Technology and the University of Canberra. Her honours thesis in the Faculty of Arts, ANU was entitled 'Australian Women's Auto-Portraiture: 1970s-1980s' (1991).
Martiniello has worked extensively with Indigenous Australian communities and youth in regional New South Wales and Victoria. In 2005 she was the public officer of the Indigenous Writers Support Group in Canberra, Indigenous Advisor on Youth Programs for the Duke of Edinburgh Awards in Australia for the Australian Capital Territory Advisory Committee, a member of the Advisory Committee of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University and a member of the Publishing Advisory Committee of Aboriginal Studies Press at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Martiniello edited Black Lives, Rainbow Visions: Indigenous Sitings in the Creative Arts (1999), a resource directory of Indigenous peoples working in the contemporary visual, literary and performing arts in the Australian Capital Territory. In 2002 she received an ACT Creative Arts Fellowship to complete her novel Blossoms of the Mulga, to illustrate her children's book Fish and Rainbow and to take up residencies at Varuna Writers' Centre and at Hedgebrook Women Writer's Retreat in Seattle, USA. She was also coordinating editor for issue one of New Dreamings: Indigenous Youth Magazine, 2002. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Polish and Arabic.
