Brigita Ozolins is an artist and an academic who lives and works in Hobart, Tasmania. She was born in Melbourne of Latvian parents and moved to Hobart in 1983. She is currently a lecturer at the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania, where she has been teaching since 2000.
Brigita has worked casually as a cleaner, a child carer, a shop assistant in a milk bar, a nursing aid in geriatric hospitals, and as a fruit picker – she also did a brief stint as a dental nurse. Her academic career started in the 1970s when she completed a BA at Monash University, majoring in the classics. After moving to Hobart in the early 1980s, she studied librarianship at the University of Tasmania, and worked for the State Library for 2 years. She then worked as an arts administrator for Glenorchy City Council, setting up the Moonah Arts Centre and coordinating events such as Symphony Under the Stars and Carols by Candlelight. After a major accident in 1994, which acted as a catalyst for reassessing her life, Brigita returned to study at the University of Tasmania's School of Art, graduating with a BFA with First Class Honours in 1999. She was also awarded the University Medal and an APA scholarship. She completed her PhD in 2004 and her thesis, which explores the links between language, bureaucracy and subjectivity through installation, was awarded the Dean's commendation.
Since 1995, Brigita has exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions, mostly within Tasmania, but also interstate. She has also undertaken 2 major projects in Riga, Latvia. Her commissions include large scale projects for David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art, The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery's Star/Dust program, the State Library of Tasmania, and the Soros Foundation, Latvia. Brigita has also received numerous artist grants, including the 2008 inaugural Qantas Contemporary Art Award, and Australia Council and Arts Tasmania grants. She has undertaken residencies in Riga, London, Paris, Gorge Cottage in Launceston, and Port Arthur, Tasmania. In 2013 she will be undertaking an Australia Council residency in New York.
Brigita completed The Reading Room for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2011, a major, interactive installation that incorporated around 30,000 books and a video of 100 Tasmanians from all walks of life reading a passage from a favourite book. She has just completed Grimstone and Savery, an installation about Australia's little known first novelists, Henry Savery and Mary Grimstone, which is on show in the State Library of Tasmania's Allport Gallery until 3 July. Brigita also continues to make work about cultural displacement based on her mother's journey to Australia through a series of DP camps at the end of WWII.
Brigita lives with her partner, Gerard Willems, who assists with the construction and engineering of many of her large scale projects. Her son, Simon Ozolins, is a cinematographer based in Sydney.