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Ingrid Ryan

Ingrid Ryan

PhD Candidate
Arts, Design & Architecture
School of Humanities & Languages

Email: ingrid.ryan@unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: Zora Simic, Jarrod Hore, Laura Rademaker (external)

Ingrid Ryan is a PhD candidate exploring how urban settler women artists helped to reimagine the Australian desert landscape as a place and idea during the interwar period. Her research sits at the intersection of art, feminist and environmental histories and considers evolving settler-Indigenous relations in the interwar decades. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts/BA (History, Honours) from the University of New South Wales. Before commencing her doctorate, Ingrid worked in various museum settings and enjoyed delivering curriculum-designed programs to school-aged children. When she's not working on her thesis, Ingrid enjoys being outdoors and pondering mid-century architecture.

From Heidelberg to Hermannsburg: How Settler Women Artists Reimagined Central Australia in the Interwar Era
  • Winner: Jill Roe Prize (Australian Historical Association, 2026), "A modern vision for a 'prehistoric' landscape: Mary Cecil Allen's new vision for Central Australia and its international foundations."

Conferences and Symposiums

  • Australian Historical Association, “Settler women artists in Central Australia 1925-1933: Historiographical correction or reproducing whiteness?”, June-July 2024.
  • International Association of Australian Studies, “Interwar women’s photography and the landscape as a ‘more-than-human’ element in settler national culture: A case study on Joyce Waterhouse”, February, 2025.
  • Australian Historical Association, “'A new and distinctive Australian Art': Mary Cecil Allen, mid-century women’s transnationalism and the quest for desert landscape modernism in Australia”, 2026.