Melinda Rackham is an artist, curator and author.
When the internet was young, Melinda Rackham wove curiously poetic interactive tales on networked intimacy and identity [1995], now preserved in Australian and international collections. Alongside designing award winning web narratives and coding soft skinned Virtual Reality worlds, her impact on global networked media includes founding and producing the lively multidisciplinary dialogue of -empyre- forum [2002-25] a vital critical platform for academics, artists, collectors, curators and writers.  
Melinda introduced diverse internet practices and emerging technologies to new audiences as ACMI’s first Networked Art curator in 2004: Networked Now; commissioned and developed engaging art+science programs for the Royal Institution of Australia; and presented Dreamworlds : Australian Moving Image on multiple massive public screens in China during the Beijing Olympics. She has also led ANAT (Australia’s foremost national art and technology organization), introducing expansive experimental programs in sound and mobile art practices; and participated in artistic, curatorial and academic capacities at innumerable Conferences, Biennales, Film Festivals and events such as Ars Electronica, Documenta and ISEA. 
Her broad experience encompasses art and writing residencies in Australia, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the UK, as well as living for extended periods in recent years on the Aeroplane Homelands near Pukatja in the Central Australian Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY)Lands.  Active in her community as a mentor, board member and consultant, since 2017 Rackham has been an Adjunct Research Professor at Adelaide University.
Melinda’s prolific texts critique, explore and poetically intervene into the worlds of art, artists, feminisms, social justice, and environmental issues; winning awards for Writing in New Media at the Adelaide Festival [2000] and the SALA National Art Writers Award [2018]. Recently Professor Rackham revisited the slimey low-res world of cyberfeminism for a series of comissioned essays on VNS Matrix, Australia’s global Cyber supergroup. This pedagogical archive [2109] comes at a time when their game works, Manifestos and newer ecological treatises are reverberating across the interwebs and being re/discovered by a new generation.
 
Probing the patriarchy at work, CoUNTess: Spoiling Illusions since 2008 [2022], is her third book - a timely exploration of embedded gender inequity in the artworld, co-authored with CoUNTess founder Elvis Richardson.  Melinda’s substantial monograph Catherine Truman - Touching Distance [2106] examine the many facets of a jeweller’s career from the visceral precision of sculptural form to working with medical researchers; while the co-authored anthology ADOPTED [2017] and FRACTURED [2026} presents raw poetry and prose from adult adoptees on loss, trauma and reclaiming self.   Working across genres, Rackham’s Instagram based performative parodies of 30 contemporary Australian female artist’s works, #remakemistresses [2020], scrutinises cultural and museological under-representation of women.
 
Living on unceeded Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide Plains, Melinda actively explores how artists and writers respond to and hold communities through envirnmental crisis such as the Toxic Algal Bloom; and continues to advocate for the recognition of harms and recources for healing for those affected by practices of child removal, trafficing and adoption,