Dr Lily Hibberd is a DECRA ARC Research Fellow in the National Institute of Experimental Arts. An interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator, her research centres on marginalised people and communities and the restoration of their histories through new forms of memory. Her projects are developed in long-term participatory art research, forming unique collaborations with communities, artists, scientists and historians.

Lily co-founded the Parramatta Female Factory Memory project in 2012 with Bonney Djuric, in collaboration with the Parragirls, a collective of surviving former residents of the Parramatta Girls Home, Western Sydney. This work enables the women to access and reconstruct their past through collaborative multidisciplinary art making to ultimately establish a ‘site of conscience’, a permanent place of recognition at the former Girls Home. Lily’s ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award project, Sentient Testimony: trauma aesthetics, digital media and memories of Parramatta Girls Home, is a practice-led research enquiry focused on digital media innovations that advance the first-hand historical witnessing of the last women survivors of this institution. Lily has co-curated four Parragirls project exhibitions and published both academic and collaborative writing as a result of her work with the Parragirls, including Exposed to Moral Danger (2014) co-curated, with Alana Valentine and Mike Chin, at Parramatta Girls Home. In 2013, Lily and Bonney curated the on site exhibition The Writing is on the Wall.

Lily has exhibited nationally and internationally in major museums, festivals and as the result of extended residency based and collaborative commissions for over 20 years. Her most recent exhibition on the origins and forgotten and invisible aspects of the capture of light, First Light, was held at the Musée des arts et métiers, Paris, from 4 November 2015 to 31 January 2016.

Community based archives and the restoration of memory are central to Lily’s practice based research. For The Cinemas Project (2014), commissioned by UK curator Bridget Crone, Lily worked over six months in the tiny Gippsland community of Yarram, Victoria, in a participatory rekindling of the last memories of the town’s former cinema, the Regent Theatre. Between 2011 and 2013, Lily collaborated with Martu Aboriginal filmmaker Curtis Taylor and his home communities in the Western Desert of Australia, to compile a contemporary history of phone booths in the region, culminating in the video installation, The Phone Booth Project, commissioned for We don’t need a map at Fremantle Arts Centre in 2012, which has since featured in the major contemporary art and anthropological exhibition, Vivid Memories: an Aboriginal art history, at Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France (2013) and in Spaced 2 Future Recall at Western Australian Museum for the 2015 Perth International Arts Festival. 

Hibberd has won a number of major awards, including the Terra Foundation Senior Scholar Summer Fellowship, Giverny, France (2012), the 2007 Early Career Research Award, Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, she was the National Winner of the 2000 UBS Art Award at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and won the 1999 Victorian College of the Arts Postgraduate Award from the National Gallery of Victoria Women’s Association. She is founding editor of un Magazine, an ongoing publication and community based art writing project and is represented by galerie de Roussan, Paris.