ProfessorDaniel Browning

The inaugural Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, Daniel Browning is an Aboriginal writer, journalist, radio broadcaster, documentary maker and sound artist. In his previous role as Editor Indigenous Radio at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, he led the Indigenous Radio Unit overseeing longstanding flagship programs Awaye! and Speaking Out as well as establishing the language revival podcast Word Up. A visual arts graduate and self-described "failed artist", Daniel went on to host The Art Show and Arts in 30 podcasts, soothing ABC audiences with a voice once described as "like honey dripping over a rock by a rainforest stream". In nearly three decades at the national broadcaster, he worked as a general and specialist arts reporter, digital journalist, newsreader, sub-editor, producer, presenter, manager and senior executive across several divisions including News and Current Affairs, triple j, ABC Indigenous and Radio National. Daniel is a widely published freelance writer, public interlocutor, arts communicator and cultural critic. From 2010 to 2015, he guest edited five specialist Indigenous issues of contemporary art journal Artlink, three of which were launched internationally. His critical essays on contemporary Indigenous art have been published by all major national and state galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His work has also featured in magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Australian Art Collector, Art Monthly, The Saturday Paper and internationally by ArtReview, Art Basel, Gradhiva and Conde Nast Traveller. Hailed by the judges as "an outstanding contribution to arts journalism", his first book, the genre-busting anthology Close to the Subject: Selected Works won the Indigenous Writing Prize at the 2024 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. Later that year, it won the prestigious Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Also in 2024, he was a finalist in the June Andrews Prize for Arts Journalism, returning the following year to jointly win the Walkley Foundation's inaugural Arts Journalism and Arts Criticism Prize with ABC colleagues Rudi Bremer and Teresa Tan. A former artistic associate of western Sydney-based arts organisation Utp, Daniel curated five site-specific deep listening experiences for Blak Box, a sound pavilion designed to amplify the voices of First Nations artists working across spoken word, poetry, music and language revival. He has been awarded two overseas residencies, the 2023 galang First Nations Residency Program at the Cite internationale des arts in Paris and the 2024 First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at Trinity Hall College, University of Cambridge. A saltwater Goori from Fingal on the far north coast of NSW, Daniel belongs to the Bundjalung people of the Lower Tweed River on his dad's side and the Kullilli people of south-western Queensland. Also through his mum, he is a descendant of the Bundjalung and Yugambeh-speaking people who lived between the five rivers in far northern NSW and south-eastern Queensland.