Tina Stefanou is an undisciplined artist working across performance, film, music, voice, sculpture, and socially engaged practice. Her work explores the performative potential of vocality to materialise immaterial relations between humans, animals, infrastructures and forces. Through experimental ethnography Stefanou develops deep, long-term and co-creative collaboration with diverse interspecies communities — from humming to cows during artificial insemination and working with pony club riders and their elderly horse companions, to staging public actions with teenagers in zoos and creating site-specific interventions in agribusiness landscapes. Now, she turns the gallery into an instrument, exposing the limits and possibilities of working class vocalities within institutional frameworks.
Stefanou's practice moves across disciplines, resisting fixed aesthetics and imposed hierarchies. Whether in a gallery, a paddock, or a public space, she creates work that embraces difference, awkwardness and unexpected connections through voice, film, performance and sculptural interventions. Her film work includes long-term field research in grain country Western Australia, where she develops Agripoet(h)ics — a practice of performative action shaped by place. More recently, her collaboration with blind motorcycle rider Matthew Cassar transforms the rider into a totemic presence, disrupting rigid representational logics and tricks.
Stefanou has exhibited, performed, and published widely, with presentations at venues including Salt Museum, Istanbul; Kadist, Paris; e-flux, New York; Le Pavé d'Orsay, Paris; University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz; Sydney Opera House, Gadigal Country/Sydney; Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm/Melbourne; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Whadjuk Nyoongar Country/Perth; The Yellow House, Gadigal Country/Sydney; Museum of Old and New Art, Nipaluna Country/Tasmania; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria, Naarm/Melbourne; and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Kaurna Country/Adelaide. Her writing has appeared in Disclaimer Journal, Journal of Sonic Studies, Artist Profile, Kunstlicht Journal (NL), and Cordite Poetry Review.
Stefanou’s accolades include an Australian Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music, 2020; Schenberg Arts Fellowship, 2020; Marten Bequest Scholarship, 2021; 68th Blake Prize (Emerging Artist Category); 2023 Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Art (local category), and major commissioning projects from Creative Australia and West Space, 2025. In 2023, she was featured in Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria and in 2024, was included in the Adelaide Biennial of Contemporary Art: Inner Sanctum at the Art Gallery of South Australia.