Cirrus@Austlit

Janine Burke grew up in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Fine Arts degree in 1974, completed a Master of Arts degree at LaTrobe University in 1983 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Deakin University in 2001. For nine years from 1973 Janine wrote art criticism and articles for journals and newspapers and was a founding member of the feminist art journal Lip. She has organized exhibitions of Australian art for state and regional galleries and has worked as both editor and consultant on art and literary magazines. She lectured on art history at the Victorian College of Arts from 1977-1982. Her book Australian Women Artists 1840-1940 was published in 1980, the first history of Australian women artists.

In 1984 she lived in Tuscany and later returned to Melbourne to become a full-time writer of fiction. Burke's novel Company of Images was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 1989. In 2006 Burke wrote The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection (2006), an examination of Sigmund Freud's art collection and a biographical portrait. (The Gods of Freud was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction in the 2007 New South Wales Premier's Awards.)

In 2008 Burke took up a five-year research fellowship at Monash University, Faculty of Arts; the following year she published Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing. The book includes chapters on artists and writers such as Georgie O'Keefe, Pablo Picasso, Karen Blixen, Virginia Woolf and Indigenous Australian Emily Kame Kngwarreye.