About
Rebekah Pryor (PhD, University of Melbourne) is an artist, writer and researcher, living and working on the lands of the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung Peoples, in and around Naarm, Melbourne, Australia.
She works at the University of Divinity (Australia) as the Doctor of Professional Practice Director in the School of Graduate Research. Rebekah is also a member of the Australian Collaborators in Feminist Theologies.
Rebekah's artistic and research practice is interdisciplinary, emerging at the intersections of contemporary art, feminist theory and philosophy of religion. Her work focuses on embodiment (particularly sex, gender and sexuality) and how this is constructed, represented and renegotiated in material cultures and communities of belief. Publications include: Motherly: Reimagining the Maternal Body in Feminist Theology and Contemporary Art (SCM Press, 2022); Contemporary Feminist Theologies: Power, Authority, Love coedited with Kerrie Handasyde and Cathryn McKinney (Routledge, 2021); Feminist Theologies: Interstices and Fractures, coedited with Stephen Burns (Lexington/Fortress Press, 2023); “Caring Rituals and Rituals of Care” in Care Ethics and Art, edited by Jacqueline Milner and Gretchen Coombs (Routledge, 2022); "Materials in Tension: Assemblage and the Art of Revelation" in Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art, edited by Samer Akkach and John Powell (Brill, 2024); "Christ as Princess of Pop" in Seeing Christ in Australia Since 1850, edited by Kerrie Handasyde and Sean Winter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); "The Icon and the Absent Other" in Topologies of Sexual Difference: Space in Philosophy and Visual Art, edited by Louise Burchill, Rebecca Hill and James Sares (SUNY Press, 2025).
Rebekah was a finalist in The 65th Blake Prize in 2018 and, from 2015-2018, the curator of Lamppost Gallery, a space dedicated to exploring contemporary art and Christian spirituality. She has worked in teaching and research in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for a number of years and, from 2018-2021, was a member of the Arts and Culture Advisory Panel of her local municipal council. Other work has been in communications, writing justice education resources for a large faith-based international aid and development NGO, and in applied science research, focusing on the social, economic and ecological implications of environmental horticulture (Landcare in particular) in rural and regional communities.