Donna West Brett

Donna West Brett is an Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Sydney. Brett is an internationally renowned scholar specialising in the history of the photographic medium as it is employed within systems of power, media, and public spectacle. She has published widely on photography and visual culture, including Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge 2016), and edited volumes with Natalya Lusty, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019) and with Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2025). She is the recipient of a 2024 Sloan Fellow in Photography at Bodleian Libraries, and a 2026 Oliver Smithies Lecturer of Balliol, Visiting Research Lectureship University of Oxford. Brett is Research Lead for the Photographic Cultures Research Group and an Editorial Advisory Committee Member for the Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury. Her current book projects are Surveillance Aesthetics: Stasi Photography and its Afterlife, contracted to Bloomsbury Academic, and On Disaster: Photography, Media and Visual Culture.