Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis & Inge Kral

Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis is a Ngaatjatjarra woman born in the bush in the early 1960s nearby Giles Weather Station. She has expertise as a translator, interpreter and teacher of her Western Desert dialects. Since 2012 she has worked with Inge Kral and Jennifer Green documenting the oral traditions of the Western Desert. She was awarded an Australian Research Council – Discovery Indigenous Fellowship in 2015, and in 2019 an Honorary Doctorate from the Australian National University.

Inge Kral is linguistic anthropologist. For more than three decades she has worked as an educator, researcher and consultant. Over recent years her research interests have included Indigenous languages, literacy as social practice and the multimodal communication practices of Indigenous youth in remote Australia and Malaysia.

Jennifer Green is linguist who, for over 40 years, has collaborated with Indigenous peoples in Central and Northern Australia on projects documenting spoken and signed languages, cultural history, and visual arts. Her research interests include Australian Indigenous languages, verbal arts, gesture and multimodality, lexicography, field methods, archiving, and research ethics.