AustLit

Tracey Moffatt studied visual communications at the Queensland College of Art and graduated in 1982. The second eldest from a family of five, Tracey and three of her siblings were fostered by a non-Indigenous family in the mid-1960s, growing up in the working-class Brisbane suburb of Mt Gravatt. As a teenager Tracey often encouraged her younger brother and sisters to participate in her backyard neighbourhood make-believe plays, dressing them up in theatrical costume designs while pursuing an inner desire to capture those moments through photographic images.

Throughout working various jobs in and around Brisbane, Tracey was paying off her college tuition fees, as well as saving for her first overseas trip to Europe. During her holidays in England, Tracey was famously arrested while protesting the use of the Aboriginal flag for the re-enactment of the First Fleet arrival for the bicentenary celebrations in 1988. Television images of that arrest made international headlines both in the United Kingdom, Australia and beyond. Moffatt was an original member of The Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative which was formed in 1987 by a group of ten Sydney-based artists, including Bronwyn Bancroft, Euphemia Bostock, Brenda Croft, Fiona Foley, Fernanda Martins, Raymond Meeks, Avril Quail, Michael Riley and Jeffrey Samuels. By the early 1990s she back in Sydney, living and working there for a considerable number of years before relocating to Chelsea, New York.

Her first feature film, BeDevil, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993 and she has also made documentary films, written essays and directed music videos. Since her first exhibition in 1989, Moffatt has shown her photographically based art in numerous exhibitions in Australia and abroad. Her work is held in various international private and public collections that include Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Tokyo), National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney) and the Parliament House Collection (Canberra). Undoubtedly one of Australia's most high-profile individual artists, Moffatt is continuously in demand as a public speaker in reference to her own unique style of photographic imagery, but she seldom holds private or public interviews, preferring to leave her captive audience intrigued as to the genesis of her work.

In December, 2003 a crowd of more than 1000 people gathered to witness one of the most exciting events in visual arts being displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, it was the opening of 'Retrospective' which detailed 30 years spanning her career.  Tracey divides her time between New York City and Noosa Heads on Queensland's Sunshine Coast where she continues to produce her own unique brand of photographic artistry for collectors and consumers of art.

In 2017, she represented Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale.