Tom Murray

Tom Murray is an academic and media producer who has worked in documentary production for over 20 years as a writer, director, and producer. His work has been selected for the world's most prestigious international film festivals, and won some of the highest accolades in the film and television industry.

Tom is recognised as one of Australia’s most distinguished screen production researchers, having won major screen industry awards, public recognition for scholarly work, university research awards and grants, and, in the Max Crawford Medal, the highest accolade for Humanities Research available to early career scholars in Australia. Through his work he has successfully communicated complex ideas in public-broadcast, gallery, festival, digital and web-based formats to millions of people, had popular and academic impact, and substantially enriched the cultural life of Australia.

Senior scholars have noted that ‘in the fields of history and media [Dr Murray] has made a globally exceptional contribution to public understanding both in Australia and across the world’ and is one of ‘Australia’s finest contemporary historical documentary makers’. ‘Dr Murray is one of the outstanding researchers in his generation'. Dr Murray's research provides 'a valuable discussion of the ethics of collecting knowledge, and the need to recognize the implicit obligations of reciprocity’.

Tom's work is deeply interdisciplinary and is interested in the history of colonialism, Indigenous culture, screen and audio production, documentary media, environmental history, ethics and reciprocity, embodied and affective knowledge, creative scholarship, and inter-cultural storytelling.

As a consultant to numerous state film funding agencies and international media organisations he has worked across Australia and the Pacific region to develop documentary and media skills and scholarship.