Biography

Matthew Thorne (b. 1993, Adelaide / Kaurna Country) is an Australian filmmaker and artist working across moving image, photography, and hybrid documentary forms.

His projects are developed over years of living and working alongside communities and the places to which they belong. Moving between fiction and nonfiction, they explore how people inherit worlds through family, labour, Country and history — and how, in that inheritance, image-making might become a rite of repair.

Matthew began his career in cinema, with credits including photography and additional direction on Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant, and photography for Justin Kurzel's True History of the Kelly Gang and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Ghosteen. Following his father's sudden death in 2017, he began living part-time in Andamooka (Kuyani / Kokatha Country), an opal-mining town he knew from childhood, where members of his family worked as miners. Over the next three years, he made The sand that ate the sea (2020) in collaboration with his family and the wider community.

In 2023, he co-created Marungka tjalatjunu (Dipped in black) with Yankunytjatjara artist Derik Lynch, following Lynch's return from Adelaide to his remote community of Aputula for healing on Country. The film received the Silver Bear Jury Prize and the Teddy Award at Berlinale, and the Documentary Australia Award at Sydney Film Festival.

His follow up, Extraction (2024), a 60-minute moving-image work about South Australia's extractive 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 the support of Creative Australia, and premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival.

In 2026, Matthew was selected for Berlinale Talents, nominated for the After Nature: Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize at C/O Berlin, and exhibited at the 9th Triennial of Photography, Hamburg.

He currently has three features 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 made with Derik Lynch.

He has published two photo books, For My Father (Palm*, 2018), images from the last week he spent with his father in Japan; and Jingo was born in the slum (Jane & Jeremy, 2021), photographs, poems and writing made during his documentation of Kurzel's retelling of the Kelly myth.

Matthew is represented by GAGPROJECTS / Greenaway Art Gallery. His work has been exhibited at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Chaillot Théâtre national de la Danse, Paris; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the National Portrait Gallery of Australia; and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

His works are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia, the National Library of Australia and the National Centre of Photography, Ballarat.

He lives and works between Athens and Adelaide.