Chelle Destefano
Visual artist / artista visiva

Chelle Destefano, a Deaf artist, born in 1979 and currently lives in Melbourne, Victoria. She lived in Adelaide, South Australia for 18 years where she began her arts studies and arts career. She has been exhibiting since 2012 and one of her highlights was being one of the 8 artists in an Arts Exchange for Berlin with Arts Access Australia in October 2017 that gave her experience of working with other artists from different cultural backgrounds. They included workshops run by the artists and an exhibition as part of the Berlin arts festival.

Chelle is a multi-disciplinary artist and she works with textiles, performance, installation, sculpture, drawing media and mixed media to explore culture and identity including her Deaf culture and other forms of critical subjects surrounding identity and the environment, and her relationship with time and space. She is currently focused on dance performance using gestural movements with her Auslan language in an abstract sense to discover what her Deaf experiences mean and the history of oppression has meant in affecting her life as many other Deaf people have experienced.

Chelle has a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Applied Design (2006) from SA (South Australia) Arts School and has recently completed her Masters of Contemporary Art at VCA in Melbourne University. She works individually and has been doing collaborations with other artists, notably a major Deaf project called What I Wish I'd Told You with artist Claire Bridge who is hearing and a Deaf alley.

Chelle recently produced a collaborative performance with three other Deaf people for the Melbourne Fringe 2021, called Streetlight #1 and the performance was shortlisted for one of the Fringe awards, the Emerging Artist Award.

Chelle is recently a winner of the Lake Art Prize (2020) for her multidisciplinary textile and performance work and has been a finalist in a number of art prizes including the Banyule Art Award for Works on Paper (2019 and 2021), the Lyn McCrea Memorable Drawing Prize (2019), the Noel Counihan Commemorative Art Award (2019 and 2020), the Midsummer Post Art Award (2020), The Incinerator Art Award (2020), the Fishers Ghost Art Award (2020), the Footscray Art Award (2021), and the Watercolour Muster (2021).

View Chelle's works at her website http://www.chelledestefano.com 

Sart life