Sarah Engledow

Background

About Sarah Engledow

At a public professional level my particular skill is to convey facts, opinions and ideas about Australian biography, art, history and popular culture in an accessible, engaging style. Equally, I specialise in writing more personal accounts of individuals who may think of themselves as having led 'just a normal' life, who have low-key interests, or who have never anticipated any opportunity to read an account of their own experience of the world. I have a strong record in written and spoken communication, founded in the years of my First Class Honours degree and Doctorate in Literature at the Australian National University and refined in every aspect of my twenty-year career in the Curatorial section of Australia's National Portrait Gallery. Every day at the National Portrait Gallery I wrote about the lives of those represented in the portraits, and those of the artists who depicted them. I wrote many hundreds of short biographies, and scores more life stories of greater length and depth. I curated many exhibitions at varying scale, wrote many articles and catalogues, and spoke frequently in public to audiences of very different kinds. Since late 2019, while a Visiting Fellow of the Australian Studies Institute at the Australian National University, I have completed writing contracts and assignments for The Australian Dictionary of Biography, the National Museum of Australia, the Museum of Brisbane, the Department of Parliamentary Services, the Australian Journal of Biography and History and several leading Australian commercial art galleries.