Rate My Professor Toni Wilkinson

Dr. Toni Wilkinson is a lecturer and Major Coordinator for Photography in the School of Design and the Built Environment, Faculty of Humanities, at Curtin University. Her research interests include photography, visual culture, feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and art design. She has served at Curtin University since 2000, beginning as a lecturer in photojournalism within the School of Media, Creative Arts and Expression, and later taking on the role of course coordinator for Photography and Illustration. Wilkinson emigrated from London to Perth in the early 1970s, worked as a Senior Photographer at X-press Magazine for six years in the late 1990s, and pursued further studies, earning a Bachelor of Arts from Murdoch University in 2003 and a PhD in 2012. Her artistic practice employs photography to explore beauty and menace from a maternal, feminist perspective, emphasizing the medium's capacity for ambiguity.

Wilkinson's solo exhibitions include Tough Pleasures at Fremantle Arts Centre in 2003, subsequent showings at Access Gallery, John Curtin Gallery, and Linden St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Art in 2004, and Prolepsis at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2005. She has featured in group exhibitions such as Ladies and Gentlemen at Queensland Centre of Photography, Changeling at Australian Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2004, and Awkward Silences at Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania in 2005. Recent projects encompass The Park, Motherlode Exhibition, and Tough Pleasures exhibitions at Curtin. Her book Tough Pleasures, published by TG Publishing, presents domestic portraits reinterpreting femininity and food, with motifs of forbidden fruit, sexuality, religion, and the absurd, accompanied by an essay from Dr. Susan Bright. Wilkinson holds a position on the board of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and has been shortlisted for the PH Museum 2023 Photography Grant as well as receiving the Visual Arts Award at Fringe World for The Park. She contributes to academic supervision and teaching in design and photography.