Associate Professor Donna West Brett serves as Chair of Art History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. She completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in 2013. Her research focuses on the history and theory of photography, encompassing post-1945 German photography, surveillance imagery, disaster and catastrophe photography, modernism, international contemporary art, and curatorial practice. As an internationally recognised scholar, she investigates the materiality of photography, visual culture, and structures of power through transhistorical and interdisciplinary approaches. Brett leads the Photographic Cultures Research Group and has contributed significantly to the field through her publications, editorial roles, and curatorial projects.

Brett authored Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016) and co-edited Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images with Natalya Lusty (Routledge, 2019), which earned the AAANZ AWAPA Best Anthology Award in 2020. She also co-edited Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany with Deborah Ascher Barnstone (Bloomsbury, 2024). Her forthcoming sole-authored monograph, Surveillance Aesthetics: Stasi Photography and its Afterlife, is scheduled for publication by Bloomsbury in 2027. Additional key publications include chapters such as 'The Uncanny Return: Documenting Place in Post-war German Photography' (Photographies, 2010), 'Material Violence: Destruction, Mishaps and Redaction of Stasi Photographs' (Law's Documents, 2021), and articles in History of Photography, Photographies, and Photography & Culture. Her honors include the Academy of the Humanities Ernst & Rosemarie Keller Award (2017) for work on the East German Stasi Surveillance Archive, the Sloan Fellowship in Photography at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (2024), and an upcoming Oliver Smithies Visiting Lectureship at Balliol College, Oxford (2026). Brett holds editorial board membership for Bloomsbury's Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, served as former editor and reviews editor for the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art, and curated exhibitions including Unconscious Places: Photography and History (GCS Gallery, 2018) and Ann Shelton: In a Forest (Australian Centre for Photography, 2012, co-curator).

Professional Email: donna.brett@sydney.edu.au