Associate Professor Shane Hulbert
Details
College: School of Art
Department: School of Art
Campus: City Campus Australia
shane.hulbert@rmit.edu.au
ORCID: 0000-0002-8388-0327
Open to
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
About
Shane Hulbert is a Melbourne-based artist, curator and academic whose work sits at the intersection of photography, imaging technologies and contemporary art. At the School of Art he brought the university's photographic programs together as one discipline and established Australia's first University Master of Photography. His current research looks at how computational imaging, machine vision and artificial intelligence are changing what a photograph is and how it carries meaning.
His photographic work has been exhibited across Australia, Asia, the Middle East and the United States. Venues include the National Gallery of Victoria, the Centre for Contemporary Photography and the Museum of Australian Photography, along with the Pingyao International Photography Festival (China), Dali International Photography Festival (China), Photo Beijing (China) the Jeonju Photography Festival (Korea) and the Xposure International Photography Festival (UAE), where he received the 2024 Global Focus Oceania Award. His practice has long dealt with place, landscape and Australian identity, and more recently with the uneasy relationship between the image and the real.
As a curator he has presented Computational & AI Photography and Melbourne Focus at Pingyao, and Execute Photography at RMIT Gallery for PHOTO 2024. His writing on photography, landscape and art education appears in the Journal of Visual Art Practice, the International Journal of Art & Design Education and Arts. He has supervised 16 PhD completions and set up research training partnerships with universities and institutes in China, Macau and Bangladesh.
Supervisor projects
- Pulse Afterimage: Herbal Healing and Everyday Bodily Perception through Photographic
- 8 May 2026
- Breaking the Dilemma of the Tourist Image: Essay Films as a Critique of Contemporary local Chinese Tourism
- 30 Oct 2025
- From Biomorphism to Material Reconfiguration: Ceramic Practice in Contemporary Chinese Art
- 29 Jul 2025
- Not Tame Enough
- 27 Mar 2023
- Returning to Mungo: Navigating Settler Colonialism Through Landscape Photography
- 1 May 2022
- New Topographies of Memory and Chance: Expanded Photography, Algorithms, and Transnational Belonging in Ho Chi Minh City
- 15 Jun 2021
- Photographing Disappearing: Photographic Portrait, the Aftermath of Conflict and the Vanishing Value of Hong Kong, with respect to the Anti National Security Law movement.
- 25 Jan 2021
- Reimagining History: Photographing World War II Reenactments
- 9 Dec 2020
- Making Place: Mediated Attention in Expanded Landscape Photography
- 6 Jun 2019
- AI Perceptions of Gender
- 21 Nov 2018
- Ever Altered: Exploring the French Colonial Impact on Vietnamese Australian Diasporic Identity Through Archival Art Practice
- 3 Sep 2018
- Sites of Uncertainty: Reframing Australian Architectural Photography
- 2 Jul 2018
- Views from Expatria: Photographing Place and Self in Transience
- 27 Feb 2017
- Chronicling Community: Ethics, Embodiment and Connectedness in Photography
- 2 Mar 2015
- Being Eurasian: Negotiating Identity Through Photography and Performativity
- 3 Mar 2014
- Landscape photography and the imaginary of an Australian Gothic
- 16 Jul 2012
Teaching interests
Shane has taught at RMIT University for more than two decades, working with students from first year through to doctoral research. His teaching treats photography as a critical and experimental practice. Students learn to use imaging technologies with fluency, and also to question what those technologies do to how we see.
He has led much of RMIT's photography education. He brought the university's photographic programs together as one discipline, and he designed and launched Australia's first Master of Photography. He has also built computational imaging, machine vision and creative AI into the curriculum, so graduates can work confidently and critically with the tools now changing the field. His Open2Study photography course reached around 100,000 learners in two years. His research on fair and transparent assessment in fine art continues in his GAILE-funded project developing AI-assisted formative feedback for art and photography students.
His influence on education reaches beyond RMIT. He has contributed to the VCAA Studio Arts Study Design and reviewed programs for Queensland University of Technology and the Education University of Hong Kong. He also serves on the Tsinghua University Academy of Arts & Design discipline review committee.
As a supervisor he has guided 16 PhD candidates to completion across Australia, Asia, the Middle East, the United States and the United Kingdom. Many of them now hold senior academic and creative roles internationally.
Research interests
Shane's research looks at how imaging technologies shape what we see, what we believe and how cultures picture themselves. It began with the Australian landscape. His doctoral and early research asked how new photographic materials and processes affected the way the land is photographed, and how myths of the "outback" came to govern Australian perceptions of place and environment. That question about technology, image and belief now drives his work on computational imaging, machine vision and artificial intelligence. He studies how these systems produce images, and asks what happens to photographic authority once the camera is no longer needed to make a picture.
He founded the Imaging Futures Lab at RMIT, a practice-led research space where artists, doctoral candidates and students test emerging imaging technologies as tools for creative work and for cultural critique. His recent work includes Semblance, a three-part AI-generated video series that uses AI to reflect critically on its own unreliable way of seeing. He also led the GAILE-funded project AI-Assisted Photographic Assessment, which is developing a discipline-informed feedback tool for art and photography education. His series A Passive Frequency received the Redpoll Trophy Silver Collection award at the 2026 China South Asia (Dali) International Photography Exhibition.
He welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD candidates in AI and creative practice, computational and expanded photography, contemporary landscape, and visual cultures of place and identity.
