About

Galatis has over 16 years’ experience working between the art market and remote communities and has received three international scholarships. In 2023 we have exhibited remote artists at Outsider Art Fair in New York 2020 and 2023 and at the Australian Embassy in Paris, as well as Sydney Contemporary. Galatis has also curated and developed two major solos with Walmajarri artists for the Perth Festival; Portals of Love and Loss; Sonia Kurarra at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery and All Mixed Up; John Prince Siddon at the Fremantle Art Centre.

In 2012 she was selected for the prestigious Independent Curators International professional development program in NYC. The youngest in the world selected that year with only 13 participants, the curated program saw her interact with the world’s most influential curators from the MET, Whitney, Guggenheim and MOMA in NYC.

In 2017, she was awarded the DLGSC Emerging curator grant to support an international professional development placement spending spent eight weeks at Creative Growth in Oakland California. Creative Growth sky rockets artists from the margins into mainstream success and are unanimously accepted as a leader in the field.  

In 2022 Galatis embarked upon a Churchill Fellowship travelling to LA, Oakland, NYC, Paris, Venice, Kassel, Brussels, Sierre and London. Her research led to an assessment of art centres commercial structures; the limitations and barriers, building on the creative strength and cultural integrity of the art centre model and supplementing its growth through new commercial partnerships.

Formative to her career was the management of Warakurna Artists located to the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Western Desert. In 2015, she led the first Western Desert merger between Kayili Artists and Warakurna Artists; liaising with both boards of directors and the Federal Government to negotiate a new, larger organisation that supported the artists across Warburton, Patjarr, Wanarn and Warakurna. Prior to this, she has spent six years as the gallery manger for Merenda Gallery Fine Art in Fremantle.

As the project manager of Revealed: Emerging Artist Showcase in 2016 and 2017 for the Fremantle Arts Centre she worked with all 27 WA art centres as well as independent artists.

In 2019-2020 Galatis was the co-curator and community liaison for Desert River Sea: Portraits of the Kimberley for the Art Gallery of WA, a series of eight complex, interconnected arts projects across the Kimberley region that together formed an exhibition, public program and major publication. 

Select Publications:

Desert, River, Sea: Portraits of the Kimberley 2019, Carly Lane, Stefano Carboni and Emilia Galatis, UWA Press.

History, Memory, Archive: What does it mean to reimagine? in ed. Ian Mclean and Darren Jorgensen book in The Archival Return in Australian Aboriginal Art.