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artist Profile

Lilah Benetti (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist working across contemporary art and cinema, with moving image as their primary material. Engaging cinema as a medium shaped by ritual, attention, and transmission, their practice moves between cinematic film and spatial installation, treating narrative filmmaking and experimental moving image as parallel sites within the same inquiry.

Grounded in research as relation, Benetti approaches still and moving image as fluid and porous, shaped through long-term collaboration, dialogue, and attentiveness to place. Working with sound, performance, and research-based collaboration, their practice explores how images hold duration, atmosphere, and affect, and how meaning is carried through presence and absence rather than resolution. Photography functions within their practice as documentation and as a thinking tool, contributing to a working archive through which light, gesture, and presence are tested and held across multiple forms.

Their work has been presented internationally, including at Tate Britain, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, IFC Center New York, and Dakar Biennale OFF. Benetti has participated in international residencies including Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Residency, The Art House UK, and MQBMBQ (My Queer Blackness, My Black Queerness) x Villa Lena. Lilah Benetti is a Black diasporic currently in Naarm (Melbourne) between Bunurong Boon Wurrung Country and Dja Dja Wurung Country.

Selected presentations

Tate Britain (UK)
Art Gallery of New South Wales (AUS)
Dakar Biennale OFF (SEN)
T4TV Queer Art at IFC Center, New York (USA)
Minor Attractions (UK)

Awards

Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund x Pride Australia, 2025
Best Screenplay, Queer Pitch Off x Gender Matters Taskforce Prize, 2025
Bowness, MaPH People’s Choice Award, 2025
Wyndham Art Prize, 2025

Selected residencies

Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock (SEN)
My Queer Blackness, My Black Queerness at Villa Lena (ITA)
The Art House (UK)
Bundanon (AUS)

Selected writing & press

VOGUE Italia (ITA)
The Face (UK)
The Guardian (UK/AUS)
Art Monthly Australasia (AUS)

I respectfully acknowledge the Bunurong Boon Wurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung peoples as the Traditional Custodians of Naarm, where I live and work. This was and always will be Aboriginal land. I extend my respect to Indigenous peoples across the Kulin Nation, whose sovereignty, lore, and cultural authority endure despite ongoing colonial violence.

I also acknowledge the many nations, communities, and cultures of the continent now called Africa, whose lands, bodies, labour, and lore have been and continue to be subjected to extraction, displacement, and erasure through slavery, colonialism, and ongoing global systems of exploitation. These processes remain active in the present, shaping conditions of visibility, dispossession, and survival.

I recognise African and African diasporic communities living in so-called Australia, many of whom are Indigenous to their own ancestral lands and cultures, now living in displacement as a result of colonial violence, forced migration, and economic extraction.

As a Black diasporic artist shaped by histories of displacement, my relationship to Africa is relational rather than territorial, formed through inheritance, dispersal, and responsibility rather than ownership or fixed origin. I understand Blackness as an expansive condition that enables relation without sameness, holding space for difference, self-determination, and agency across lived experiences.

Living and working on Aboriginal land, I approach this place with care and responsibility, while holding the complexity of respect, solidarity, and loss that mark my own interrupted relationship to land.