Rate My Professor Ali Baker

Associate Professor Ali Baker serves in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, where she is also a full member of the Assemblage Centre for Creative Practice Research and the Flinders University Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing in the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work. Her academic background includes a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from the University of South Australia in 1997, a Master of Arts (Screen Studies) from Flinders University in 2002, and a PhD in Cultural Studies and Creative Arts from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University in 2018. For her doctoral thesis, Sovereign Goddess: Looking for Gumillya the Bound and Unbound, she received the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for Doctoral Thesis Excellence in May 2019. Baker's research centers on Indigenous studies and drama and performance, with teaching interests in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cinema and Media Studies, cultural studies, memory and intergenerational transmission of knowledge, Indigenous artistic practice and performance, and colonising archives and repatriation.

Baker leads significant projects including Reimagining the Humanities through Indigenous Creative Arts as Chief Investigator from 2022 to 2026, Sovereign Acts/Love Praxis from 2024 to 2025, and contributions to Unsettling Queenstown for the Australia Pavilion at the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2023. Her key publications encompass Being Inside the Old Tree in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (2025), Art-led learning and Sandra Saunders’ history paintings in Artlink (2025), Holding Black Space and the Long Shadows of Racist Texts in Meanjin (2023), and The weight of river stones in Water Lore: Practice, Place and Poetics (2022). She coordinates topics such as INDG3002 Decolonising Institutions: Indigenous Critical Creative Praxis, INDG2001 Black Poetics: Indigenous Literary Studies, INDG2002 Indigenous Australian Art, and INDG2004 Reconciliation and Indigenous Knowledges, and lectures in INDG9000 Indigenous Research Methodologies, INDG1001 Race and Representation: Indigenous Identities, and others. Baker holds positions on the Artlink Magazine Board, the Adelaide City Council Public Art Round Table, the SALA Advisory Committee, and the Creative Industries Steering Group of the Department for Correctional Services. In 2023, she co-received the International Women's Day Irene Bell Award with collaborators Simone Tur, Natalie Harkin, and Faye Blanch. She has contributed to performances including APRON-SORROW/SOVEREIGN-TEA in 2021 as part of the Unbound Collective.