About Dee Smart
LIVES & WORKS IN SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Dee Smart is a Sydney-based Australian visual artist and actor whose practice spans painting and drawing. For more than twenty years she has maintained a professional arts practice, developing a distinctive visual language informed by immersion in landscape, environmental observation and the natural world.
Painting directly from life, her dynamic yet intimate portraits peel away the armour of the modern world to reveal the truth, vulnerabilities and inherent strength of the sitter. In an act of defiance, Smart reimagines powerful women to challenge the prevailing narrative of women as passive objects of desire, instead casting them as sovereign agents of change and transformation. Echoes of luminaries such as Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks reverberate through her work, guiding us through the labyrinthine corridors of identity and resistance.
Working primarily from direct experience of place, Smart explores the interconnected relationships between people, ecosystems and memory. Her recent work has focused on marine environments, biodiversity and ecological resilience, investigating both the fragility of natural systems and nature's remarkable capacity for regeneration.
Smart moved from Adelaide to Melbourne as a teenager to study ballet at the Victorian College of Arts. Further studies in acting in Sydney led to a successful career in film, television and stage. Following the birth of her first child, she began pursuing visual arts, where a passion for life drawing led directly to a painting practice that has gained significant momentum and critical recognition.
Smart has exhibited extensively throughout Australia, including solo exhibitions with Nanda\Hobbs Gallery, Sydney. She has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize, the Paddington Art Prize and the Darling Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. Her 2018 Archibald portrait was collected by one of the most prominent private collections of female artists in Australia. Her work is held in private collections throughout Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles and New York, as well as The Bennett Collection in Texas, USA — making her one of only three Australian artists represented in that collection.
Alongside her visual arts practice, Smart has a background in dance and performance and is the founder of Ballet Wings, a community-based creative initiative that combines movement, storytelling and visual arts. This interdisciplinary approach continues to inform her interest in collaboration, community engagement and environmental storytelling.