Dr Courtney Pedersen
Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice,
School of Creative Arts,
Visual Arts
Biography
Courtney Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts at QUT. She was previously the Academic Program Director for the School of Creative Practice and the Head of Discipline for Visual Arts. She has supervised postgraduate research, coordinated Honours research, and taught undergraduate units in the Visual Arts at QUT since 2006. Her research interests include gender, creative practice-led research, and visual arts pedagogy. She completed her PhD, an exploration of feminism, genealogy and social history through public installation art, in 2005. Prior to that, she was a practising artist for over 10 years, having studied photography at the Victorian College of the Arts in the early 1990s. She has been a member of the reviews editorial team for the peer-reviewed Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, was a co-director of the feminist artist collective LEVEL, and a board member Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space in Brisbane. She currently serves on the board of the Institute of Modern Art.Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
Personal details
Positions
- Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice,
School of Creative Arts,
Visual Arts
Keywords
Visual arts, Contemporary art, Feminism, Public Art
Research field
Visual arts
Field of Research code, Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC), 2020
Qualifications
- Doctor of Philosophy (Queensland University of Technology)
- Bachelor of Fine Arts (Victorian College of the Arts)
Professional memberships and associations
Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) (Professional member) Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association
Teaching
Courtney Pedersen has taught and coordinated Visual Arts studies in twentieth and twenty-first-century art, exhibition and display in the visual arts, and contemporary Asian visual culture. She has also designed and delivered interdisciplinary learning in creative practice through large foundational units across the School of Creative Practice. She received a Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching, Early Career in 2007.
Publications
- Haynes, R. & Pedersen, C. (2018). To care for self and others: a collaborative conversation. In A. Black & S. Garvis (Eds.), Women activating agency in academia: Metaphors, manifestos and memoir (pp. 174–184). Routledge. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/119123
- Haynes, R., Pedersen, C., Coombs, C. & Franzmann, C. (2018). RIGHT NOW! Presented at: RIGHT NOW! [Visual Art Work]. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/116865
- Haynes, R. & Pedersen, C. (2016). Acting out: performing feminisms in the contemporary art museum. Journal of Australian Studies, 40(2), 203–214. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/221368
- Coombs, C., Franzmann, C., Haynes, R., Holtsclaw, A. & Pedersen, C. (2016). Recipes and revolutions: consciousness-raising and feminist picnics. Feminist Review, 114(1), 130–138. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/222531
- Pedersen, C., (2015). Art and the anxious city: Public art, public interest and the public good. Axon: Creative Explorations, 5(1), 1–9. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/82704
- Pedersen, C. & Haynes, R. (2015). Double Blind: Supervising women as creative practice-led researchers. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(12), 1265–1276. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/84986
- Pedersen, C., (2015). Quaternary [Guest Curator]. Presented at: Quaternary [Guest Curator]. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/225529
- Pedersen, C., (2014). Representing places never visited: landscape and the diasporic imagination. Photography and fiction: Locating dynamics of practice (Queensland Festival of Photography 5 Conference), 71–74. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/82898
- Pedersen, C., Coombs, C. & Holtsclaw, A. (2014). She's done alright for a girl: Strategies for teaching women artists. Proceedings of the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference 2014, 1–7. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/81954
- Pedersen, C., (2012). Running dry : Brisbane's public fountains. In A. McNamara (Ed.), Sweat : The Subtropical Imaginary (pp. 65–77). Institute of Modern Art. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/49826
QUT ePrints
For more publications by Courtney, explore their research in QUT ePrints (our digital repository).
Filter publications:
A complete list of publications is available at: https://www.qut.edu.au/about/our-people/academic-profiles/cb.pedersen
Awards
- Type
- Contributor to Reference Publication
- Reference year
- 2019
- Details
- Chapter, 'Acting Out: Performing Feminisms in the Contemporary Art Museum', included in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism. Editors: Tasha Oren and Andrea Press. Routledge: London & New York.
- Type
- Invited Talk, Presentation or Participant
- Reference year
- 2017
- Details
- Feminism Renewal Art Network. Invited speaker, The FRAN FEST Symposium, Art Gallery of South Australia, 16-17 September 2017.
- Type
- Chair/Convenor of Conference Workshop
- Reference year
- 2016
- Details
- Co-Convenor, Australian Women and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA) International Biennial Conference, De-storying the Joint, QUT, 29 June - 1 July.
- Type
- Chair/Convenor of Conference Workshop
- Reference year
- 2016
- Details
- Co-Convenor, of the Australian Council of University Art & Design Schools (ACUADS) Annual Conference, Adaptation, QUT, 29-30 September.
Supervision
Current supervisions
- Care as resistance: examining intimacy as the embodiment of queer subjectivities in contemporary art
MPhil, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Dr Rae Haynes - Climate of Violence: Contemporary art responding to present conditions faced by trans women
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Dr Rae Haynes - Contemporary paper cutting art practice as an archive of Nikkei Australian identity
PhD, Mentoring Supervisor
Other supervisors: Dr Sophie McIntyre, Associate Professor Charles Robb - Cultural Value in Creative Learning Experiences: The Role of the Teaching Artist
PhD, Associate Supervisor
Other supervisors: Associate Professor Kristina Kelman, Professor Sandra Gattenhof - FULL SATURATION: Autistic Processual Writing with-in Capitalist Immediacy
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Dr Phillip Ablett - How can multimodal creative practice communicate the experience of EMDR therapy?
MPhil, Associate Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Kari Gislason - Patches of Hope: Place-based creative resistance as expression of care and radical hope
PhD, Associate Supervisor
Other supervisors: Associate Professor Jen Seevinck - Threading the Muse: Revitalising Feminist Creative Practice Using Craft and Familial Knowledge In The Australian PostColonial Context
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Dr Naomi Blacklock - What role can contemporary art play in preserving and reinterpreting Cook Island heritage?
MPhil, Mentoring Supervisor
Other supervisors: Dr Naomi Blacklock, Associate Professor Charles Robb, Associate Professor Kristina Kelman
Completed supervisions (Doctorate)
- Making White History in Australia (2025)
- Self-Fashioning as Rapid Curation: A Case Study Through Anna Piaggi (2025)
- Empathic gestures: Exploring emergent states of being as an aesthetic practice of existence (2024)
- Living kantha: A creative interpretation of Bengali women's traditional practices (2024)
- Children as change-makers: How socially engaged art in New York City can inform arts pedagogy for children (2023)
- #SoBrave: The Crisis of Neoliberal Feminine Bravery (2019)
- Conjuring Alterity: Refiguring The Witch and the Female Scream in Contemporary Art (2019)
- Thinking Outside the Black Box: The Apparatus between Art and Science (2019)
- Playing with Me: Feminine Perspectives in Fetishism and Contemporary Art (2017)
Completed supervisions (Masters by Research)
- Artists as A(na)rchivists: Unpacking Brisbane Artist-Run Initiatives and the Archive (2025)
- Artist-run Initiatives and Community: a Practice-Led Examination of How Artist-Based Communities are Formed and Understood in Contemporary Australian Art (2022)
- Making Marks: Handlability In Landscape and Learning (2019)
- 'intricate, infinite' Addressing the Ineffable Aspects of Women's Experience Through the Lens of Traditional Craft Practice (2018)
- Melancholy and the Memorial: Representing Loss, Grief and Affect in Contemporary Visual Art (2018)
- Waking up to Waste: Exploring the Transformative Capacities of Deep Listening and Sound Art (2018)
- Mapping a Liminal: Nurturing of Kantha into Contemporary Art (2017)
The supervisions listed above are only a selection.