Jeanine Leane is an award-winning Wiradjuri writer, poet, essayist, critic, editor and researcher, with over thirty years experience in teaching. She has been working in the broader fields of Australian literature, Aboriginal writing and storytelling for over three decades.

As a scholar she has presented on Aboriginal literature, transitions from oral to writing cultures, and culturally rigorous critique,  unpacking unequal power dynamics in literary representations of First Peoples  in a range of publications, conferences, and academic collectives, including several keynote addresses at literary and creative writing forums such as the Association for Studies of Australian Literature and the American Association for Australian literary Studies.

She is the recipient of three Australian Research Council grants on Aboriginal writing and storytelling. From 2016 to 2023 she was an Associate Professor in Indigenous Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Through her teaching of creative writing including the ethics of representation — i.e., who tells whose story? — she challenged the limitations of the white imagination, and the unequal power-dynamics of what was until recently a monocultural literary landscape. All her works centre First Nations stories first and are positioned to interrupt and intervene in the colonial narrative that either evades or misrepresents First Nations peoples’ experiences and stories of place.

In 2024, she was commissioned to write theme poetry for two major exhibitions: Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Victoria. Her language poem Ngindhu nginha – you are here featured as the opening installation at MAMA and is the overarching theme of the exhibition of local and national artists to follow over the next two seasons 2025-2026.

Her suite of poems, Seeds of Hope appear as permanent exhibits in the new Arid Gardens Precinct; and featured as illuminated cubes in the Lightscape 2025, Melbourne’s award-winning immersive light experience at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne.

Jeanine was always told by the matriarchs who raised and mentored her that you can ‘write to and of Country deepest and truest in the first words of place’, learning my first language that was silenced in her Gunhinarrung’s (grandmother’s) generation is central to the integrity and the heart and soul of her poetry and writing. As an adult she has had the privilege of learning Wiradjuri from a community Elder and has used language in her writing ever since to honour the matriarchs who gifted her with their precious gatherings of stories to pass on to future generations. Jeanine’s language journey is ongoing.

In all her creative endeavours the knowledge and wisdom of community Elders and Ancestors is central. She grew up in the 1960s and 70s on Country in rural NSW with her extended Wiradjuri family and received a free tertiary education in the early 1980s. Jeanine is grounded in Wiradjuri knowledges of place and people, and all her work, across poetry, prose and critique honours this unbroken connection.