Jude Rae was born and raised in Sydney and attended the Julian Ashton Art School as a secondary student in the 1970s. She studied Art History at the University of Sydney and undertook postgraduate study at COFA in 1984. She holds an MA (Visual Arts) from Canterbury University, New Zealand, and has taught part-time at tertiary level in both Australia and New Zealand for the last 25 years, most recently with the ANU in Canberra. Since the late 1980s Rae has been interested in still life painting – or, as she prefers, ‘object painting’ – which has persisted in informing her more recent engagement with portraiture. Her work also reflects a long-term interest in the philosophical ideas associated with phenomenology, in particular the writing of Maurice Merleau Ponty. Her paintings are exhibited nationally and internationally, and are held in major collections in both Australia and New Zealand. She won the Portia Geach prize in 2005 and again in 2008. The National Portrait Gallery commissioned her portrait of Frank Fenner in 2007 and one of her portraits was a leading image for the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Idle Hours in 2009-2010.
