Past ACCFs

Deputy Director, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, and Co-founder and former Project Director, Asia-Pacific Triennials, Australia

Caroline Turner is Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. Prior to taking up this appointment in January 2000, she spent 20 years as a senior art museum professional. As Deputy Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, she organised and curated over 60 international exhibitions, including Matisse, which featured works from 50 collections worldwide, and which toured Australia in 1995. Turner was co-founder of the Asia-Pacific Triennial and served as the Triennial's Project Director in 1993, 1996, and 1999 at the Queensland Art Gallery.

Turner has written extensively on contemporary Asian art and museums as well as lecturing on this subject internationally. Her latest book of essays, Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, is the most up-to-date survey of the dramatic developments in Asian and Pacific contemporary art and museums in the last decade. She also teaches an on-line Master's course at the Australian National University on this subject.

Turner was appointed by the government of Australia to the Australia-China Council in the 1980s and the Australia-Indonesia Institute in the 1990s. She is currently heading a research project funded by an Australian Research Council grant entitled The Limits of Tolerance which explores the links between art and human rights. She is also Director of the "Creativity and Human Rights" research platform of international scholars based at the Humanities Research Centre.