Nikki Easterbrook is a photographic artist based on Gundungurra Country in the Southern Highlands, New South Wales, working across large-format film, camera-less and experimental processes, digital capture and moving image. Her research-based practice asks a single question across every body of work: what does a photograph actually know, and what does it only pretend to?

Her subject is landscape and the systems that deliver it. The work tests the indexical assumptions embedded in the medium — how the photographic trace constructs, rather than simply records, authority over place, time and the material world. Each project sets processes against one another so their competing claims to know a place become visible.

The authority of images has never been more contested. Her current research turns to vertical imaging systems. Seeing Like a Satellite examines the technical limits, cultural politics and structures of control that shape how satellite imagery of extreme and contested environments is captured, processed and circulated as authoritative knowledge, and by whom. It extends from her 2023 King Island residency into ongoing fieldwork.

Easterbrook's work has been exhibited nationally and is held in private collections in Australia and Southeast Asia. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts with First Class Honours in Photomedia from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and a Master of Teaching with Distinction from the University of Wollongong.