Carly Lane is the Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at AGWA. She is a Kalkadoon woman from Queensland but has lived in Perth for just over twenty years. Carly grew up in Townsville and Brisbane, where her parents and most of her siblings still live today. She is the youngest of five children – three girls, two boys – and is married with (step)children.
Carly’s first museum job was as Assistant Curator at the Berndt Museum of Anthropology. Since then, she has worked at other museums and galleries including the Art Gallery of Western Australia and as an independent curator. She first worked at AGWA from 2002 to 2004, then from 2007 to 2010. In 2015, Carly was formally appointed as Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. She says she has a passion for curating exhibitions and making spaces where Indigenous art and voices can be seen and heard.
Carly has curated numerous exhibitions. These include the inaugural Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards, the second National Indigenous Art Triennial and more recently, Resistance: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art from the Art Gallery of Western Australia. As an honorary curator, she has also curated Aboriginal photography exhibitions for the Perth Centre for Photography. As co-curator, she has also worked on Spinifex: People of the Sun and Shadow and the sixth Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards. Carly has edited and contributed to various publications including, as co-editor with Glenn Iseger-Pilkington, the 2014 annual Indigenous art edition of Artlink.
Carly has First Class Honours in Anthropology from the University of Western Australia. She is excited to be a part of the Desert River Sea team.