Summary

Gail Mabo is a Meriam artist from Mer Island in the Torres Strait. Her multidisciplinary practice stretches from dance to visual arts and is always grounded in Indigenous cultural knowledges. She is the daughter of land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo and educator and activist Bonita Mabo AO.

After completing her early education at the first school for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Townsville, opened by her father in the 1970s, Gail studied dance at the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre in Sydney from 1984 to 1987. She performed in Jimmy Chi's Bran Nue Dae in its 1991 Sydney season and worked as a choreographer and dancer in Tracey Moffat's 1986 short film Watch Out and as an actor in Moffat's Nice Coloured Girls in 1985. In 2005 she directed the stage show Koiki which was a performance based on the life of her father.

In 2004 Gail completed a Certificate IV in Visual Arts at the Barrier Reef Institute of TAFE and a Diploma of Visual Arts at the same TAFE in 2007. She has enjoyed immediate success as a visual artist that has seen her involved in many group and solo exhibitions across Australia. Her work deals with contemporary expressions of Indigenous identity, peeling back of layers of history to reveal the spirits of the Indigenous peoples who lived on these lands and are in prominent private and public collections.