Rate My Professor Terri Bird

Associate Professor Terri Bird serves as an artist and writer in the Department of Fine Art at Monash University's Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. Her academic journey includes a PhD in Visual Culture titled 'Art's relation to exteriority: the work of materiality in spatial practice' from Monash University awarded in 2007, a Master of Arts in Fine Art titled 'Exhibiting material' from RMIT University in 1999, a Graduate Diploma of Arts in Art History from Monash University in 1997, a Graduate Diploma of Fine Arts from the University of Melbourne in 1987, and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from Curtin University in 1981. Terri's research centers on sculptural practices that link art's material operations to the potential force and dynamics of matter, influenced by feminist philosophers who challenge conventional understandings of matter beyond form, content, and meaning.

Since 2002, she has collaborated extensively with Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell under the collective Open Spatial Workshop (OSW), which secured the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture in 2005. Notable OSW projects include the exhibition Converging in time at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in 2017, investigating entanglements of geology, geography, colonisation, resource extraction, and philosophical thought via specimens from Museum Victoria's Natural Sciences Collection. Additional accolades for OSW encompass finalist status in the National Works on Paper in 2018, the AAANZ Best University Art Museum Exhibition Catalogue Prize in 2018, and winner of the Museums Australasia Multimedia & Publication Design Awards (Major) in 2018. Terri Bird has contributed key essays such as 'Forming' in Practising with Deleuze: Design, Dance, Art, Writing, Philosophy (2017), 'Registering Surfaces, Excavating Inheritances' in Deleuze Studies (2016), 'Figuring Materiality' in Angelaki (2011), and 'Exhibiting Practices & Organizational Relations' in Making Space (2007). Her artistic works feature in exhibitions like the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art in 1994, Signs of Life in 1999, and Skinned in 2004. She has organized events such as the West Brunswick Sculpture Triennial in 2009 and engages in artist-initiated activities including CLUBSproject. Current and recent projects include Metabolic Scales (2023), found and made: life, art, things (2022), Relational Ecologies (2024), and Climate Aware Creative Practices (2023). As an accredited graduate research supervisor, she accepts PhD students and contributes to research on materiality, spatial practice, Deleuze, geology, the Anthropocene, and geo-social assemblages.