Marnie Badham

Associate Professor Marnie Badham is known internationally for her expertise in socially engaged and public art, cultural policy and evaluation, and participatory research methods. Through dialogic forms for encounter and exchange with attention to relational ethics and care, Marnie’s community research partnerships and pedagogies bring together disparate groups of people (artists, local communities, government) in dialogue to examine and effect local issues. Her art-research practice is co-created with long term collaborators in the context of Indigenous-settler-migrant relations, critical hospitality and food-art-politics, affective engagement and climate anxiety, and creative cartographies through durational artist residencies.

Marnie designs and manages complex multi-site and intercultural research partnerships across community, industry, and government, currently leading the interdisciplinary team for ‘Public Art and its role in connecting people and place - The social benefits provided by public art at Sydney Metro stations’ with iMOVE (2025). With Vicki Couzens she co-leads community projects focused on developing ethical cultural frameworks: Listening to Country, Listening to Community: towards a co-created framework of people and place-based value and values for the Dandenong Creek Art Trail (2020-22); Sharing Oral Knowledge with Genevieve Grieves and GARUWA (2023-24); and with Jody Haines pedagogic films The Power That We Have… Listen Up! (2020) and Revisiting the Possum Skin Cloaks (2019). With Ye Lui, she co- the Huaniao Island Public Art Festival (2022, China-Australia) and led the Code of Practice and consultations on public art commissioning following review of 27 LGA public art policies (NAVA, 2019).

Marnie co-leads the Cultural Value Impact Network with Bronwyn Coate, is Adjunct Professor, Thompson Rivers University in Canada and a director for Res Artis: global network of artist residencies.  She co-leads industry research including the ARC Linkage Ambitious and Fair: towards a sustainable visual arts sector with NAVA and AMaGA (McQuilten et al. 2021-24) and is expert advisor for public art, residencies, and funding (Canada Council, Creative Victoria, Nillumbik, Saskatchewan Arts, Cardinia). She has delivered 13 partnered evaluations including: 2025 Sydney Metro; 2024, 2022, 2017 All the Queens Men (queer seniors); 2024, 2021, Ngamumu (Indigenous mothers); 2024 MAPCo Fed Square (discovery paper); 2015 Artback NT (Indigenous dance), and 2011 Arts Access Victoria (disability access training). She co-edits books for arts practice, policy and industry Tastes of Justice: food-art-politics in Asia and Australia (Springer, 2025), Visual Arts Work: sustainable strategies for the Visual Arts Sector (Springer, 2025), and (Routledge, 2015) Making Cultural Count: the politics of cultural measurement. 

Marnie has a PhD in Creative Arts and Cultural Policy (University of Melbourne, 2012), a Masters of Community Cultural Development (University of Melbourne, 2008) and undergraduate degrees: Bachelor of Fine Arts, Inter-media and Bachelor of Arts, Art History (University of Regina, 1996 & 1996).

www.marniebadham.com