Linda Payi Ford is a senior woman whose country is Kurrindju in the Northern Territory. She was educated in the bush and in Australian education institutions in the Northern Territory, Queensland, and Victoria.
In 2009, part of Linda Payi Ford's life story was featured in the National Museum of Australia's exhibition From Little Things Big Things Grow: Fighting For Indigenous Rights 1920-1970. Here she documents how her mother Nancy Daiyi avoided having Ford removed from her care soon after birth by escaping across flooded waters back to Wagait.
Linda Payi Ford has been the Chief Investigator for the project Bringing Indigenous Knowledge into Early Childhood Settings. She has served as Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Business and Arts, School of Australian Indigenous Knowledge Systems at Charles Darwin University and also as Senior Indigenous Policy Officer in the Northern Territory Department of Regional Development, Primary Industry, Fisheries and Resources.
Dr Ford has been a Senior Lecturer in the Aboriginal and Torres Starit Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland and in 2017 she was a member of the Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography working party.