Dr. Vanessa Russ is a Ngarinyin /Gija woman from the Kimberley.
She graduated in 2009 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the College of Fine Arts (Art + Design) UNSW before returning to Western Australian to pursue a PhD in Fine Arts from UWA 2013.
Dr Russ was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2014, in which she investigated the affects of national identity in mainstream art
museums on Indigenous populations, travelling across the United States of America, Hong Kong and Singapore.
As an artist, her work has been featured in the Third Space and the Revealed: Emerging Aboriginal Artists from Western Australia exhibitions in Perth. At the end of 2015 she held her first solo exhibition Memory and Trace at Seva Frangos Gallery in Subiaco.
Dr Vanessa Russ was appointed by the University of Western Australia as Associate Director of the Berndt Museum in 2016. A UWA graduate born and raised in the Kimberley, Dr Russ heads up one of the most important research collections on Australian Aboriginal art and culture in the world.
Dr Russ is the first Aboriginal director of the Berndt Museum in its 40-year history. She is a Researcher at The University of Western Australia.
In 2018 Dr Russ was appointed to the Board of the Art Gallery of WA.