FORMER “CityNews” music writer, Judith Nangala Crispin, is the 24th annual recipient of the $10,000 Windmill Trust Scholarship for regional NSW artists.

Crispin, a multi-talented artist, has a doctorate in composition from the ANU School of Music for which she wrote an opera about Leonardo da Vinci and won the Blake Poetry Prize in 2020.

Best know in Canberra as the long-time director of Manning Clark House, she  has focused in recent years on her fine photography practice and on rediscovering her indigenous ancestry.

She will use the scholarship to make a visual-literary portrait of Millewa, the Murray River, where it passes through the country of her ancestor Charlotte Clark.

A descendant of the Bpangerang people of north-east Victoria, Judith is a poet and visual artist and lives in Wamboin, where her practice is centred around lumachrome glass printing, a combination of lumen printing, chemigram and cliché-verre techniques.

“It’s been such a tough couple of years for Australian artists, and it makes such a difference to feel supported and valued by peers,” Crispin said today, October 14.

“This scholarship allows me to retrace my ancestor’s footsteps along the banks of Millewa, the Murray River, making artwork to honour the plants and animals that live there.”

“In a year of great uncertainty, Judith Nangala Crispin’s project impressed upon us the importance of maintaining connection to family, culture, and place,” said this year’s assessors, artist and 2020 scholarship recipient Debbie Taylor-Worley, artist and writer Matt Chun, and director of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Sarah Gurich.