Angus McDonald(III)

Angus McDonald is an award-winning artist and documentary filmmaker. He studied painting at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney (1993-1995), winning the school's Brett Whiteley Scholarship in 1994. He continued his studies at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy in 1999 & 2000. Since 1995, McDonald has staged more than 30 solo exhibitions across Australia & internationally. In 2007 he travelled to Antarctica as the expedition artist for the Mawson's Huts Foundation. McDonald has been a frequent finalist in numerous national art awards including Australia's biggest art competition, the Archibald Prize, where he has been selected as a finalist on six occasions. In 2020, his portrait of Kurdish Iranian writer and filmmaker, Behrouz Boochani, received the Archibald Prize's People's Choice Award. In 2017, McDonald created a film project to advocate for more humanitarian approaches to managing the welfare of forcibly displaced people seeking asylum. His film content is a selection of short films and interviews about current refugee approaches in Australia, Greece, and the Middle East. In 2019, McDonald directed & produced his first film, "MANUS", a documentary short about refugees & asylum seekers held for years under brutal conditions by the Australian federal government on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. The documentary centred on testimonials of numerous men held offshore, secretly filmed by Walkley award-winning journalist Olivia Rousset. MANUS won multiple awards and nominations at film festivals in Australia and internationally for both Best Documentary and Best Direction. MANUS also qualified for selection at the 2020 Academy Awards in the Documentary short category. His first feature project, titled "Freedom Is Beautiful" premiered at the 2023 Sydney Film Festival. It tells the story of two remarkable Kurdish refugees who were held for 8 years by the Federal Government under its hard-line offshore processing policy. McDonald directed the documentary and co-produced the project with award winning French film producer, Mélita Toscan Du Plantier, supported by Amnesty International McDonald is a committee member for Human Rights Watch Australia and lives with his family in Lennox Head NSW.