Bundanon

Neha Kale is a widely-published writer of criticism, journalism, essays and other nonfiction.

Her writing has appeared in many publications including ArtReview, Vogue, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Running Dog and SBS. She formerly edited VAULT magazine and currently writes The Influence column for The Saturday Paper. Neha has presented lectures and panels at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Heide Museum of Modern Art, has spoken at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and judged The Walkley Awards and the University of Sydney’s David Harold Tribe Sculpture Award. In 2022, she helped lead a group of delegates in rethinking colonial hierarchies as part of Australia at the Venice Biennale.

Her literary work has received a 2023 Faber Scholarship for Creative Nonfiction, a 2023 Create NSW grant and was highly commended in the Ann Moyal Non-fiction Fellowship and the Liminal and Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize.

In Residence at Bundanon

At Bundanon, Neha will develop a chapter from her manuscript-in-progress, a work of literary nonfiction that draws on memoir, criticism and travelogue to explore how the female, migrant body inhabits social and cultural spaces amid changing ideas of ‘home.’ The chapter, tentatively titled Trace, delves into the ways in which the language of Australian landscape painting implicates migrants in a settler-colonial project. It asks: how do we move away from a relationship with place that recreates the logics of colonial possession? And what does it mean to be part of an ecology that we can’t understand?