About — jen valender

Jen Valender is an Australasian artist born in Aotearoa New Zealand and based in Naarm Melbourne, Australia. Her practice creates performative encounters with landscapes, animals and elemental forces, considering questions of agency, perception and cohabitation. Working across film, performance, sculpture and sound, she investigates how art can make space for forms of attention that exceed the human. Grounded in the cinematic, her work is shaped by site-specificity, material conditions, ecology and ethical dilemmas. She approaches visual art as a language capable of holding multiple perspectives and temporalities at once. Her past collaborators include friendly pythons, newborn calves, house flies and a retired granite quarry.

Having exhibited and performed in galleries, museums and public spaces nationally and internationally, Valender has worked with the Saatchi Gallery (London), Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne), Ian Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne), Museum of Art and Culture and Multi-Arts Pavilion (Lake Macquarie), Centre for Projection Art (Melbourne), Spier Light Art Festival (South Africa), Wrong Biennale (Portugal/France), Gertrude Street Projection Festival (Melbourne), Manly Art Gallery & Museum (NSW), Benalla Art Gallery (Victoria), WIRWIR Gallery (Berlin), Grossraum Gallery (Vienna), Artists for Artists (New York), Abbotsford Convent (Melbourne), Metro Tunnel Creative Program (Melbourne), Collingwood Yards (Melbourne), Circus Oz (Melbourne) and Rosi Braidotti's Posthuman Artist Labs (Utrecht University), among others.

Alongside her exhibition practice, Valender regularly presents artistic research at conferences and symposia. In 2025 she presented at the University of Western Australia and the University of Southern Queensland, following previous presentations at the Victorian College of the Arts, Sydney College of the Arts, Griffith University and the Forum des images in Paris for the International Symposium of Electronic Art. Her moving image works have recently been screened at Adelaide Festival Centre and Bunjil Place in Melbourne as part of Art After Dark.

Valender is the recipient of the Australia Region M&C Saatchi Group and Saatchi Gallery Art for Change Prize (2023), the Ian Potter Museum of Art Miegunyah Research Award (2019), the Next Wave New Precinct Art Prize (2020), the Jim Marks Postgraduate Scholarship (2021), the Gertrude Street Projection Festival Judges' Choice Award (2021) and an Australia Council for the Arts grant (2022). She was also awarded the 2026 Highly Acclaimed Artist Residency at The Farm, Margaret River, Western Australia, and has been a finalist in the Arte Laguna Prize in Venice (2024), Nillumbik Contemporary Art Award (2025), Wyndham Art Prize (2023) and Manly Art Gallery & Museum Art Prize (2022).

Recent projects include commissions for the Melbourne Arts Precinct, solo exhibitions at Shepparton Art Museum, Mary Cherry Contemporary and Project8 Gallery, performance, film and sculpture commissions for the Lorne Sculpture Biennale, new work for Beechworth Biennale, Science Gallery Melbourne, MONA and SPRING1883 Art Fair as part of a collaboration with Australian fashion label Alpha60. Her writing has been published by Art + Australia and the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools’ peer-reviewed journal FINDINGS, where she introduced the concept of "cross-dissonance" to describe the complexities of practice-led artistic research.

Valender is a resident artist at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and holds a Master of Fine Arts (Research) with first class honours from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class honours from MADA, Monash University and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Anthropology with first class honours from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. As a teenager, Valender trained at the Music and Audio Institute of New Zealand (MAINZ) in Auckland.

She is currently a PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

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Valender acknowledges the traditional owners and custodians of the land and waterways on which she has the privilege to live, research and create. Specifically, the Yalukit Willam clan of Euro-Yroke country, known as the coastal tribe of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. She pays respect to all Traditional Owners and Elders and recognises that their land was never ceded.

Artist as Animal film still, International Symposium of Electronic Art 2023 Symbiosis, Forum des images, Paris, France. Photo: Gene Alberts, Broadacre Farm, 2022.