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Tracey Moffatt


Tracey Moffatt (b. 1960, Brisbane, Australia) is an artist and filmmaker of Aboriginal Australian heritage. She is recognized for revolutionizing global photographic practice at the end of the twentieth century and is one the most innovative contemporary artists working today. Her stylistically diverse body of films and photographic works explore childhood memories and broader issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and identity.

Moffatt’s work has been the subject of more than one hundred solo exhibitions and has been widely shown at museums and galleries internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, Cannes Film Festival, Stedelijk Museum, Dia Art Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

She is the subject of numerous publications, including The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt (Charta, 2007), a major monograph dedicated to her film and photographic practice. She lives and works between Sydney, Australia and New York.







Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, Tracey Moffatt, Australia, 35mm︎digital, 19 min, 1990

A dazzling grand opera of silence and maternity, as opulent as Robert Wilson, as soulfully anguished as Fassbinder.
–Manohla Dargis  

On an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her dying white mother. The adopted daughter’s attentive gestures mask an almost palpable hostility. Their story alludes to the assimilation policy that forced Aboriginal children to be raised in white families. The stark, sensual drama unfolds without dialogue against vivid painted sets as the smooth crooning of an Aboriginal Christian singer provides ironic counterpoint. Moffatt’s first 35mm film displays rare visual assurance and emotional power.
–Women Make Movies






Nice Colored Girls, Tracey Moffatt, Australia, 16mm︎digital, 16 min, 1987

With humor, elegance, and finesse, Tracey Moffatt brilliantly deconstructs the classic good girl/bad girl dichotomy in a game of seduction, symbolic violence, and illusions.
–Berenice Reynaud

This stylistically daring film by Tracey Moffatt audaciously explores the history of exploitation between white men and Aboriginal women, juxtaposing the ‘first encounter’ between colonizers and native women with the attempts of modern urban Aboriginal women to reverse their fortunes.
–Women Make Movies

Through allegory, experimental techniques, and a witty use of voice-over, artist Tracey Moffat subverts the colonial gaze in this short about three young Australian Aboriginal women out on the town with a “captain.”
–The Museum of Modern Art


Co-presented with Women Make Movies and Three Fold. Image credits: all artworks, stills, and portraits courtesy of the artist © Tracey Moffatt and Women Make Movies.

View next: Ulysses Jenkins, as part of Media City Film Festival: Spotlight Series



Founded in 2020, Three Fold is an independent quarterly based in Detroit that presents exploratory points of view on arts, culture, and society in addition to original works in various media, including visual art, literature, film and the performing arts. We solicit and commission contributions from artists, writers, and activists around the world. Three Fold is a publication of Trinosophes Projects, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization located in the historic Eastern Market neighborhood in downtown Detroit. Click here to check out Three Fold’s events page and view a schedule of the publication’s on-site activities.

Three Fold recognizes, supports, and advocates for the sovereignty of Michigan’s twelve federally-recognized Indian nations, for historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, for Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. We operate on occupied territories called Waawiiyaataanong, named by the Anishinaabeg and including the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Bodewatomi (Potawatomi) peoples. We hold to commit to Indigenous communities in Waawiiyaataanong, their elders, both past and present, and future generations.