Dr Kirsten Wehner

‘Wetland (River Country)’, S.A. Adair and Kirsten Wehner (with participating artists), 2023-25, installation view (Moree, NSW, April 2025). Image: Cameron Muir

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Kirsten Wehner is a multi-disciplinary curator, artist and scholar based in Ngunawal Country (Canberra), Australia. Her work explores how creative and collaborative responses to places and artefacts might evolve better cultures of river care, that is, ways of living with waterways that nourish them/us as vibrant, storied, multi-species communities. Kirsten has a particular interest in ecologising museums and collections, often investigating how concepts of ‘river kin’ might be animated through re-connecting artefacts and practices with place. 

Currently an independent practitioner, Kirsten was formerly the James O Fairfax Senior Fellow in Culture and Environment (2022-25) and Head Curator, People and the Environment (2011-16), at the National Museum of Australia. She was Director, PhotoAccess, a centre for photographic culture, from 2018-22. She is the Board Co-Chair of the arts organisation the Cad Factory and contributes to the Plumwood Committee, which cares for the heritage-listed home of the late environmental philosopher Val Plumwood.

Recent projects have included: More than a Fish Kill, a feature documentary exploring cultural healing after ecological disaster; River Country, a touring installation and engagement program storying Murray-Darling waterways; Creek, a multi-year walking, listening and making project tracing an urban waterway, and Troubling Burrell, a collaborative creative practice investigating historical platypus collections.

kirstenwehner.com

‘Flow story (Weston Creek)’, Kirsten Wehner, 2025. Image: Brenton McGeachie

‘Platypus puggle (after Burrell)’, Kirsten Wehner, 2025. Image: Zoë Sadokierski