Biography

Matthew Thorne (b. 1993, Adelaide / Kaurna Country) is an Australian artist and filmmaker working across moving image, photography, and hybrid documentary forms. His projects are made collaboratively over years of living and working with a community and their land — each work a rite of repair. The works often examine contemporary Australian identity, its spiritual life, labour, masculinity, colonial inheritance, and relationship to Country.

Marungka tjalatjunu (Dipped in black) (2023), co-created with Yankunytjatjara artist Derik Lynch over a decade-long relationship, follows Lynch's return from Adelaide to his home community of Aputula for healing on Country. It received the Silver Bear Jury Prize and the Teddy Award at Berlinale, the Documentary Australia Award at Sydney Film Festival, and Best Short Documentary at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and has been exhibited at the Lagos Photo Festival, Melbourne Photo Festival, and Hamburg Triennial of Photography.

Extraction (2024), a 60-minute moving-image installation about Australia's extractive mining industry and its impact on Country, was co-created with Kuyani/Kokatha storyteller Donna Waters. It was commissioned by the Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Film Festival with Creative Australia, and premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival.

Earlier works include The sand that ate the sea (2019), made with the opal-mining community of Andamooka (Kuyani / Kokatha Country) about the contemporary settler community's fraught relationship with the Australian 'frontier'; and Gaib (2020), an essay film made in Batu Karas, West Java with Yoga Abdul Ghani about his community, their relationship to time and spirituality, and mortality in the aftermath of the 2006 Java tsunami.

In 2026, he was selected for Berlinale Talents, and nominated for the C/O Berlin Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize. He currently has three works in development: Flatlands, a mythic coming-of-age story set on the outskirts of Adelaide; One road in / One road out, a hybrid documentary following five weddings across five coal-mining communities; and Ngayulu (I / Me), a direct documentary work made with Derik Lynch in follow-up to Marungka tjalatjunu.

Matthew has also published two photobooks, For My Father (Palm*, 2018) and Jingo was born in the slum (Jane & Jeremy, 2021), a photographic series and essay made from inside Justin Kurzel's True History of the Kelly Gang. He also contributed photography to Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis's album Ghosteen.

His art practice is represented by GAGProjects / Greenaway Art Gallery and has been exhibited at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Chaillot — Théâtre national de la Danse, Paris; the Art Gallery of South Australia; the National Portrait Gallery, London; and the National Portrait Gallery of Australia. He has received the Martin Kantor Portrait Prize (2023) and nominations for the Olive Cotton Photography Award (2023), National Photographic Portrait Prize, Australia (2021), and Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, UK (2020).

Matthew lives and works between Athens and Adelaide.