Neha Kale is a widely-published writer. She works in many forms including criticism, journalism, essay and other nonfiction. For more than a decade, her writing on art, contemporary culture and society has appeared frequently in international and Australian publications including The Sydney Morning Herald, ArtReview, Vogue, Elephant, VICE, The Guardian, Griffith Review, Art Guide Australia, SBS, Kill Your Darlings, Gourmet Traveller, Running Dog, i-D, Wonderground, BBC and more.
She currently writes a fortnightly column called ‘The Influence’, interviewing cultural figures about the art that has informed their lives for The Saturday Paper, one of Australia’s most respected weekly newspapers.
From 2015 to 2018, she edited VAULT, an influential print quarterly that champions art, visual culture and critical conversations from Australia and around the world and served as the magazine’s editor-at-large until late 2019. Before this, she was a columnist for SBS, where she wrote about gender, race and the politics of everyday life and regularly contributed columns to The Sydney Morning Herald’s Daily Life.
In 2022, Neha was chosen by the Australia Council, alongside four industry leaders, to lead a national group of delegates to rethink colonial hierarchies and deepen Australia’s engagement with the international art world as part of Australia at the Venice Biennale.
She has also worked with institutions, brands and organisations – such as the Sydney Opera House, Carriageworks, the Museum of Australian Democracy, GuardianLabs and PwC – in her capacity as a writer, editor and editorial director.
Neha has given lectures and moderated panels at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the University of New South Wales, the Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. She has spoken about her work at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Emerging Writers Festival and Noted Festival, facilitated workshops for Writers’ Victoria and served as a judge for The Walkley Foundation and the University of Sydney’s David Harold Tribe Sculpture Award.
In 2021, her writing was highly commended in the Liminal and Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize. She was awarded a Faber Academy Scholarship for Creative Nonfiction in 2023.
Neha was born in Mumbai, India and has lived in Melbourne/Naarm and London. She grew up in Perth/Boorloo where she studied writing and cultural studies at Curtin University, graduating with First Class Honours.
These days, she lives and works on unceded Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia.
SELECTED WRITING
Features, reportage
Curtain Call (Vogue, 2022)
A modern-day Moulin Rouge
Spirited Away (Spectrum, 2021)
On the unerring faith of Hilma af Klint
Staging a Revolution (Spectrum, 2021)
Lin-Manuel Miranda brings his virtuosic Hamilton to Sydney
Regeneration Cycles (Spectrum, 2021)
The National remakes memories through art
Notes from the Near Future (Art Guide Australia, 2020)
Imagining a utopian aesthetic
How Seven Years in Detention Led Farhad Bandesh to Laura Jean (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2020)
On music as balm and bridge
Stories of Home and Homeland (The Guardian, 2020)
Mapping immigrant journeys
The Reality Facing Female International Students After Abuse (SBS, 2019)
How universities fail vulnerable women
Is There Such a Thing as the Clothing Gap? (SBS, 2019)
The price of looking “professional”
Women and Ageing: “I’ve developed the courage to live my own truth” (The Guardian, 2018)
The uncharted freedom of getting older
Apartheid in Focus (Spectrum, 2018)
The gaze of South African photography great, David Goldblatt
Childcare Workers’ Strike (The Guardian, 2018)
On the gross devaluation of women’s work
Welcome to Sydney’s Last Ladies-Only Ocean Baths (VICE, 2017)
A refuge by the sea
Is it Time to Rethink the Australian Dream? (SBS, 2017)
Unravelling the cult of property ownership
Can Motherhood Make You a Better Artist? (SBS, 2016)
Where art and life intersect
Why We Should Embrace Solitude (SBS, 2016)
The case for more me time
Profiles, portraits, conversations
Sampa the Great (Spectrum, 2021)
A musician finally comes home
Lindy Lee, (ArtReview, 2021)
How to envision the cosmos
Maria Fernanda Cardoso, (The Saturday Paper, 2021)
Unearthing the art in nature
Jose Roca (The Saturday Paper, 2021)
The Sydney Biennale curator’s radical vision
Michael Williams (Openbook, 2021)
A life in reading
Lisa Reihana (ABC Arts, 2020)
The acclaimed Maori artist meets Australia’s first woman pirate
Aisha Dee (The Guardian, 2020)
Playing against type with the star of The Bold Type
Amala Groom (The Saturday Paper, 2020)
The Wiradjuri conceptual artist lays colonial ghosts to rest
Rosemary Laing (VAULT, 2020)
The Australian image-maker’s electric landscapes
Arthur Jafa (Spectrum, 2019)
An encounter with the art star who gives Blackness a new lexicon
Karen O (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2019)
Talking sonic freedom with the force behind The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Bat for Lashes (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2019)
Natasha Khan and the promise of unseen worlds
Ziggy Ramo (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2020)
Truth-telling on the nation’s greatest stage
Michael Armitage (The Saturday Paper, 2019)
The Kenyan artist’s rapturous visions in paint
Teju Cole (VAULT, 2018)
Skyping with the laser-sharp photographer and critic
Nick Cave (VAULT, 2017)
“Is there racism in heaven?”
Grayson Perry (VAULT, 2016)
A Turner-winning artist’s psychic spills
Lisa Yuskavage (VAULT, 2016)
Reinventing the female nude
Essays, other nonfiction
Looking for Carol Jerrems (Running Dog, 2022)
An A-Z of visual intimacy
Naming Rights (The Saturday Paper, 2021)
The all-woman exhibition in the age of #Metoo
What High School Debating Tells Us About Power (Kill Your Darlings, 2021)
Teenage misogyny and the curse of Ancient Greece
Blood Food (Counter, 2020)
What colonial violence tastes like
In Isolation with Neha Kale (Dining in Place, 2020)
The secret life of spices
Class Ceilings (Art Guide Australia, 2020)
On classism in the artworld
Wu Tsang’s Into A Space of Love (Running Dog, 2019)
The nightclub as idea
Suburban Dreaming (Griffith Review, 2018)
Immigrant aspiration at freeway’s end
In Praise of ‘Nineties Mallrat Summers (VICE, 2017)
The anodyne pleasure of “going to the shops”
Columns, criticism, reviews
Nalini Malani’s Gamepieces (ArtReview, 2023)
Shadowboxing with a singular contemporary artist
No Document (Mascara Review, 2021)
The city as elegy
Wansolwara at UNSW Galleries (ArtReview, 2020)
Rerouting the art of the Great Ocean
Japan Supernatural at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (The Saturday Paper, 2019)
In the realm of Japanese ghosts
Why it’s Dangerous to Blame Immigrants for the Housing Crisis (SBS, 2017)
On twisted rhetoric and the barriers to buying a house
Choosing Experiences Over Things Doesn’t Make you Morally Superior (Daily Life, 2016)
When capitalism morphs without notice
Is Our Obsession with Ethnic Eating a Sign of Cultural Progress? (SBS, 2016)
The cult of culinary voyeurism
The Airbnb Bias: When Racism Happens in Unexpected Places (Daily Life, 2016)
On the conservatism of the “sharing economy”
The Myth of Starving Artist Is Starving Us of the Art We Need (Daily Life, 2016)
Who does it serve when art romanticises poverty?
The Underrated Magic of Walking (SBS, 2017)
Taking life one pavement at a time
What If Our Cities Paid Tribute to Great Women? (SBS, 2016)
How urbanism erased female legacies
PRESS (selected)
Liminal Magazine, Interview #190, Neha Kale, September 2021
Special Guest, Jacky Winter Gives You the Business Podcast, May 2019
The Freelancers’ Year, Q&A with Neha Kale, August 2018
The Wheeler Centre, Working with Words: Neha Kale, August 2017
ABC Radio National, Drive, My Feed, July 2017
Image credit: Laura Mangen