Ellamay Khongroj Fitzgerald is an emerging Australian–Thai artist whose practice moves fluidly across lens-based storytelling, installation, painting, and participatory forms. In May 2026, she joins Studio 88 Artist Residency’s Evolving Identities programme, and will develop a new body of work that marks a pivotal moment in her practice, embracing slower, more contemplative modes of making.
4K video projection, 6 minutes (video still image)
Based on Yugambeh Country, Ellamay’s work unfolds through a deeply personal yet collectively resonant inquiry into identity, memory, and belonging, shaped by her lived experience as a second-generation Asian Australian navigating dual cultural inheritance. Ellamay holds a Bachelor of Photography from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, and has exhibited across Australia, including at Outer Space Gallery, HOTA Gallery, and Next Wave. She has been the recipient of several awards and residencies, including the Next Wave Kickstart Program (2024–25), and was a finalist in the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award (2024).
At the core of Ellamay’s practice is a commitment to critical and intimate storytelling. She creates spaces for shared reflection, inviting participants to engage with visual and sensory memory—recalling fragments of childhood, familial ties, and cultural traditions. These exchanges become both method and material, where storytelling operates as a reciprocal act of witnessing. Her works often mirror her own process of self-inquiry, tracing the contours of absence and connection within her personal and ancestral histories.
Public Program presented for Next Wave at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Melbourne Australia.
Working primarily with oil painting alongside analogue photography, Ellamay approaches image-making as a process of translation rather than documentation. Photographs become points of departure—fragmented references that are reinterpreted through the temporal and material language of paint. In parallel, analogue photography operates as a living archive, capturing new moments that extend and complicate existing narratives. Together, these mediums allow her to navigate the tension between what is remembered, what is lost, and what is reimagined.
Recent returns to Thailand in 2023–24 have marked a significant deepening in her practice. Time spent in Chiang Mai with her late grandmother, alongside reconnection with her father and extended family, has expanded her understanding of cultural memory as something lived, embodied, and at times, untranslatable. Moving through domestic spaces, shared meals, and photographic archives, Fitzgerald engages with memory not as a fixed record, but as something partial, fragile, and continually unfolding.
Her recent projects, including A Seat At The Table (2025) and the evolving public program Outdoor Kitchen, reflect an ongoing interest in food as a site of relational exchange—where identity is negotiated through gesture, ritual, and everyday acts of care. These works position the domestic as both intimate and political, foregrounding the quiet ways culture is carried and transmitted.
During her residency at Studio 88 Artist Residency as part of the Evolving Identities programme, Ellamay will develop a new body of work titled Father Tongue. This project marks a pivotal moment in her practice, embracing slower, more contemplative modes of making. Drawing from a personal photographic archive developed during her recent journey to Chiang Mai—the first time travelling with her father and brother after more than two decades apart—Father Tongue reflects on reconnection, absence, and the spaces in between.
Rather than seeking resolution, Father Tongue dwells within the gaps—those left by distance, language, and time. It considers how identity is shaped not only by what is known, but also by what remains inaccessible. Through a process-led engagement with memory and material, Ellamay’s work invites a quiet reckoning with uncertainty, positioning artistic practice as a space to sit with, rather than resolve, the complexities of belonging.
More about Ellamay Khongroj Fitzgerald on her website and instagram.
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