Lauren Starr is an Australian photo-media artist based in Bendigo, Victoria, whose work explores women’s interior lives, inherited stories and relationships to place. Working across staged photography, digital compositing and mixed media, she creates richly layered images in which history, memory and imagination are allowed to overlap.
Drawing on women’s histories, folklore, fairy tales, personal ancestry and the Australian landscape, Starr is interested in what is carried across generations: memory, grief, belief, longing and the stories through which we understand ourselves. Her constructed tableaux often place women and girls within landscapes that feel simultaneously real and imagined, using recurring symbols, gesture and natural elements to suggest inner worlds that cannot be documented literally.
Her visual language draws on the Pre-Raphaelites, symbolic painting and photographic storytelling, while her process combines contemporary photography with painterly and material interventions. Much of the source material for her work is photographed close to home in Central Victoria, before being reassembled into imagined spaces that sit somewhere between photograph, painting and remembered place.
Starr is a finalist in the 2026 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize and Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, and has been selected for the Olive Cotton Award and Head On Photo Awards. She is the recipient of the Bluethumb Art Prize Photography Category and Overall Prize (2022), and her work is held in public collections including Bendigo Art Gallery, Parliament House Melbourne and Treasury Place, Victoria.
Starr lives and works on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Central Victoria.
Selected Achievements:
2026
Exhibition (forthcoming), Grainger Gallery, Canberra OCT 15th
Finalist, Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize
Finalist, Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize
Included in The People’s Gallery: Portraits from the Collection, Bendigo Art Gallery hoarding installation
Group Exhibition, Prelude, Australian Galleries
2025
Finalist - Head On International Exposure Awards
Finalist - Olive Cotton Photography Prize
Acquisition, Treasury Place Melbourne
2024
Acquisition, Parliament House Melbourne
Finalist, Nyland Photography Prize
2023
Acquisition, Bendigo Art Gallery
Finalist, Beautiful Bizarre photography category
Solo exhibition, Luminaries
Ted x Speaker
2022
Winner, Bluethumb Grand Art Prize
Winner, Bluethumb Photography Category
Winner, Queenscliff Art Prize
Finalist, Maldon Portrait Prize
Solo Exhibition, Golfields Gothic
Group Exhibition, Bluethumb Gallery
Group Exhibition, Sydney Bluethumb Gallery
2021
Winner, Bluethumb Art Prize Photography Category
Solo exhibition, Memento Mori
Group exhibition, Space
