Tina Stefanou is a visual artist and performer living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that she calls voice in the expanded field. As a means to seek more inclusive ways of making and to frame tangled relationships, she engages in multispecies performance with a family of local others, friends not-yet-made, and poet(h)ic meetings of matter. Informed by diasporic and working-class experiences, Stefanou engages in sound, filmography, and research as social practice, exploring with and beyond all-too-human and more-than-human vocalities. She works with multiple communities over long periods of time and locations through para-ethnographic field work, vocal workshops, performance making, and filmic traces, exploring forms of poetic knowledge.

She has an ongoing relationship with a herd of elderly horses with who she co-creates performative environments with and is especially interested in creating alternate forms of performance and exhibition, outside of human-dominated contexts and audiences. Extending from her vocality, Stefanou’s activities are also embodied in writings, music improvisation and collaborations, ephemeral events, sculptures, and installations. The artist is exploring the forces, flows, and fabulations that uphold, reproduce or alter where and for who art practice and welfare is experienced— playfully working through multi-scalar relations from the planetary commons to locally situated socio-economic realities of the (extra)ordinary. She celebrates and honours her long-term collaborators at Jocklebeary Farm, alongside scenographer Romanie Harper, cinematographers Wil Normyle and Andrew Kaineder, composer and bassist Joseph Franklin, and vocalist Lisa Salvo.

Stefanou has performed, presented, published and exhibited locally and internationally including: Salt Museum (Istanbul); Kadist Gallery (Paris); Le Pavé d'Orsay (Paris); the University of Music and Performing Arts (Graz); Residency Corazon Gallery (La Plata); The Yellow House (Sydney); E-flux (NYC); The Sydney Opera House; Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne); University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia); Festaal (Berlin); Carriageworks (Sydney); Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne); The Ian Potter Museum (Melbourne); Blindside Gallery (Melbourne); Perth Institute of Contemporary Art; McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park (Langwarrin); Stacks Projects (Sydney); Hamer Hall (Melbourne); Pheonix Central Park (SYD); Bundanon Museum (Illaroo); University of Western Australia (Perth); Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (Melbourne); National Gallery of Victoria; Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania); Mini American Anthropology Association with Michael Taussig (NY); Rosi Braidotti Posthuman Artist Labs (Utrecht University); 3ecologies Project (Canada); Buxton Contemporary (Melbourne); AAANZ (AU/NZ); Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane); Melanie Roger Gallery (Auckland); Audio Foundation (Auckland); The Substation (Melbourne); Performance Review (Melbourne); Sarah Scout Presents (Melbourne); Hazelhurst Art Centre (SYD); Buxton Contemporary (Melbourne); Composite Gallery (Melbourne); Chapter House (Melbourne); Collingwood Yards Arts Precinct (Melbourne); West Space (Melbourne); Disclaimer Journal; Journal of Sonic Studies; Artist Profile; Kunstlicht Journal (NL); Unprojects and Cordite Poetry Review.

She has worked with organisations and artists such as: Liquid Architecture; Art + Australia online; Women’s Art Register; Alpha60; Erth Visual & Physical Inc; Chiara Guidi; Mark Applebaum; SPACED; Young Voices Melbourne; West Australian Opera; DADAA Gallery; The North Midlands Project; VCA Fine Arts Honours Faculty; VCA Fine Art Sculpture Faculty; Art Gallery of Western Australia; The Australian Art Orchestra; Centre of Visual Art; Speak Percussion; Cementa; RMIT’s non/fictionLab; Parramatta Artist Studios; Latrobe University (Bendigo); Adelaide Botanic Gardens; Adelaide Zoo; Soft Centre; ADSR Zine; Greek Centre Melbourne; On Diamond; Duré Dara; Semi Permanent; MUD; Centre for Projection Art; Project Anywhere; Art Gallery of South Australia; Alexandra Pirici; Nice Music; Patricia Reed; and Chamber Made.

Stefanou has won an Australian Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music with The Music Box Project (2020); Schenberg Arts Fellowship (2020); Marten Bequest Scholarship (2021); City of Melbourne Arts Grant (2022); SPACED Residency (2022-23) and was a finalist in the 67th Blake Prize and Incinerator Art Award (2022). She is a recipient of the 2023 Nillumbik Contemporary Art Prize (local category), and CultureLAB development program with ACCA and Arts House (2023-24). In 2023, she was featured in a survey of prominent Victorian artists in the Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, received Art Projects for Individuals funding from Creative Australia, and was nominated for an Australian Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Practice with Chamber Made. In 2024, Stefanou featured in the Adelaide Biennial of Contemporary Art: Inner Sanctum at the Art Gallery of South Australia, was a finalist in the Darebin Art Prize, the recipient of the 68th Blake Prize (Emerging Artist Category). In 2025, Stefanou received a VACDF Major Commissioning Projects from Creative Australia, Ian Potter Emerging Artist Grants, was featured front cover artist of Artist Profile and Arts Guide. She presented a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art as part of their Contemporary Australian Solo series of annual exhibitions by Australian artists at critical moments in their practice.

Stefanou is a PhD candidate and casual academic in Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and is currently showing Motet Fail at West Space in Naarm, Feb 18th - April 18th 2026.

I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I work and live, and recognise their continuing connection to multispecies collaboration, voice, land, song, water and community. I pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging and to all First Nations people.

Photo: Andrew Kaineder