Dr Tracey Benson
Tracey M Benson works at the intersection of ecological systems, citizen empowerment, place-based knowledge, and creative practice. Over nearly three decades she has built one of Australia's most distinctive practices at the boundary between art, ecology, and community — one that takes seriously both the urgency of climate change and the depth of the cultural and relational shifts required to respond to it.
Her career has spanned education, government, and community-based programs, consistently oriented toward a single question: how do people come to understand the systems they are part of, and what does it take to shift their relationship with those systems? Her answers have drawn on emerging technologies, analogue and digital storytelling, participatory art, and ecological practice — always in service of communities learning to see and act differently in their own places.
A committed systems thinker, Tracey is particularly interested in more-than-human design: the design of processes, spaces, and relationships that acknowledge the full complexity of living systems, not only human ones. Her practice bridges Western scientific frameworks with experiential, interconnected, and Indigenous ways of knowing — not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a genuine methodological commitment. She believes that the ecological crises of this era cannot be addressed by technical solutions alone, and that the creative and cultural dimensions of transformation are not peripheral to serious climate work but central to it.
This conviction is reflected in her academic work, which is unusually broad in scope. Tracey holds a PhD in Media Arts and Technology from the Australian National University, where she explored the intersection of digital practice and place-making. Her Research Masters in Applied Science from the University of Canberra examined energy vulnerability at the community scale — an inquiry that sits at the heart of climate adaptation practice. A further Research Masters from Queensland University of Technology investigated the social dimensions of personal collections of objects, extending her long-standing interest in belonging, memory, and the material cultures through which people relate to place. Taken together, her academic formation reflects a career-long focus on the relationships between people, their environments, and the stories they tell about both.
In 2025, Tracey commenced a second PhD, this time exploring the vernacular design of the Queenslander House to inform community needs for climate-resilient home design for flood futures. This work reflects the convergence of her long-term research interests in social and environmental justice, pro-environmental behaviour change, wellbeing, and the politics of belonging within the liminality of the current time.
Research project:
Exploring Scandinavian influences on Queensland architecture: An investigation of cultural and environmental adaptations in the Queenslander house.