Emma Pegrum is a journalist, creative editor, photographer and multi-faceted producer who works across a variety of editorial and interdisciplinary artistic projects. She is the co-founder and editor in chief of Mess Books, an Australian book publisher interested in art, photography, design, architecture and literary non-fiction. Primarily writing profiles and features with a focus on the arts, culture and society, Emma’s work has been published by titles such as T Australia: The New York Times Style Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Broadsheet Media and Fabric Quarterly, among others. She has also worked as a commissioning editor and photo editor, and most recently edited and produced the pilot issue of AGWA Paper, a new arts broadsheet conceptualised for the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA). Emma also wrote, produced and story directed a series of documentary shorts about Western Australian artists for AGWA and oversaw the production of a variety of creative collateral as the gallery undertook a major rebrand. She has also written exhibition essays and biographic and didactic text for a number of private commissions.
Emma specialises in working with a diverse range of collaborators across editorial, design, film, digital media, 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.
Her narrative-driven photographic practice explores contemporary Australian identities, place, nostalgia and relationship dynamics. She is a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize 2022 and her work has been exhibited at the Perth Centre for Photography, as well as at Pig Melon in the group show Co-ordinates, curated by Karl Halliday and Henry King.