Raphaela (Rosie) Rosella is an Italian Australian artist from Nimbin, an over-policed, low socio-economic community in New South Wales. For two decades, she has worked at the intersection of socially engaged art and documentary practice, co-creating lens-based works alongside her sisters, friends, and family—women directly impacted by the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). Together, they have built a co-created archive spanning photography, moving image, audio, and the collection of ephemera and state-issued documents, to resist bureaucratic representations of their lived experiences.
This work, which forms the long-form project ‘You’ll Know It When You Feel It’, has been exhibited extensively including South London Gallery, London (2023); Institute of Modern Art, Magan-djin/Brisbane (2023); PHOTO 2022, Monash Gallery of Art, Naarm/Melbourne (2022); Centre for Contemporary Photography, Naarm/Melbourne (2022); Musée de l’Elysée, Switzerland (2020); Organ Vida International Photography Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Croatia (2018) and the Photoquai Biennale, France (2015). Beyond the gallery, this work plays a critical role in legal and personal spaces—appearing in family albums, memorials, custody disputes, and courtrooms. It has supported successful bail and parole applications and contributed to reduced custodial sentences.
Rosella holds a Bachelor of Photography with First Class Honours from Queensland College of Art (2012) and a PhD from RMIT’s School of Art (2025). From an abolition feminist standpoint, her research challenges the foundations of archiving, the authorities that govern them, and reimagines how archives might function in non-carceral ways. In turn, her research offers a relational framework for decarcerating archives within long-form and collaborative documentary photography projects.