About

Toni Hassan is an interdisciplinary social practice artist and award-winning writer, making visual work after years in journalism and advocacy.

She is interested in supporting social change and making narratively-driven work that attempts to make sense of personal and collective experiences and histories, beginning with the self. In her drawing, painting, digital and installation work she investigates power relations, culture (myth, ritual and patterns of human relating) and nature (seeing how things are connected).

Toni experiments with the processes of making art as commentary and move restlessly between diverse approaches and materials. Her Honours work explored environmental grief and involved research that fed a dialogic project: Conversation Pieces: Remembering Australia’s Black Summer, culminating in a collaborative public performance.

Her work is held privately and in public and private collections. Her paintings have been shown in the celebrated Fisher’s Ghost Prize three years in a row, 2020-2022 and Stations of the Cross, Sydney.

Toni is also a trained freelance facilitator aimed at harvesting wisdom for the common good. Her group work is informed by her advocacy and community engagement in public health, education, economic justice and equality. 

She is a Walkley Award-winning journalist who has appeared in The Saturday Paper and The Sydney Morning Herald. Her formative years in the trade were at the ABC where she was a reporter, producer and presenter for nearly 20 years. She is a sometimes-guest presenter of the Religion and Ethics Report.

Toni is the author of Families in the Digital Age, an adjunct research fellow with the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, at Charles Sturt University and a former Associate with the Centre for Responsible Technology at The Australia Institute.

Toni was born in Durban, South Africa, grew up on Gadigal land/Sydney, lives and works on Ngunnawal-Ngambri country in the Australian Capital Territory.