Emma Pegrum is a journalist, creative editor, photographer and multifaceted producer who works across a variety of editorial, publishing and interdisciplinary artistic projects. Across five years of freelance journalism, Emma has written profiles and features covering the arts, culture and society for titles such as The Saturday Paper, T Australia: The New York Times Style Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, UNION
Magazine, Broadsheet Media and Fabric Quarterly. She is currently the editor of The Luxury Report, a quarterly magazine interested in the arts and culture, design, architecture, business and economics, publishing some of Australia’s most respected journalists, including Lucianne Tonti, Brodie Lancaster, Jane Albert, Rosamund Brennan and Louise Martin-Chew. Emma has previously worked as a commissioning editor and photo editor for numerous independent publications, and in 2021 edited and produced the pilot issue of AGWA Paper, an arts broadsheet conceptualised for the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) that featured contributions from the likes of Neha Kale (former editor, Vault), Claire G. Coleman (author, Terra Nullius and Lies, Damned Lies), Simon Webster (The New Yorker, The Saturday Paper), Sisonke Msimang (author, Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela), Kelly Fliedner (un Magazine, Semaphore), Tristen Harwood (The Saturday Paper, The Monthly), Anne-Louise Willoughby (author, Nora Heysen: A Portrait) and Max Vos (former editor, Grok).
In 2022, Emma co-founded Mess Books, a publisher and creative practice interested in art, photography, design, architecture and society.
Emma specialises in working with a diverse range of collaborators across editorial, design, film, digital media, communications, academia and the visual arts to produce large-scale creative projects, with her own background in journalism, writing and visual storytelling ensuring a cohesive end result. She currently works with Melbourne artist Jessie French, producing various interdisciplinary creative collaborations through French’s studio, Other Matter. Emma also produced the two most recent works of renowned transdisciplinary artist Ian Strange, which have been exhibited around the world.
Emma’s narrative-driven photographic practice explores contemporary Australian identities, themes of place and nostalgia and relationship dynamics. She was a finalist in the National Portrait Gallery’s National Photographic Portrait Prize 2022.