Ivana Matic Girard was born in Serbia to Serbian and Hungarian parents. From 2006, she spent ten years in the Middle East, then went on to live in France, where she became a citizen, before settling in Perth in 2018, a city she now calls home as an Australian citizen. Each move reshaped how she saw herself, and left her with a lasting curiosity about what identity even means when the ground keeps shifting under you. Ivana has never quite belonged to one place, and that restlessness is also visible at the heart of her work. She works between photography, painting, printmaking, and sculpture and installation, moving between disciplines as each idea demands rather than settling into one technique.

Before turning fully to fine art, she also spent years studying public health and counselling. It was in France that Ivana first built a career in photography, training in portraiture and studio work in Paris and exhibiting in a group show in Thonon-les-Bains. She later furthered her training through photography workshops in New York, before turning to fine art. In Perth, when she formally returned to studying art, she deliberately sought out studio-based units in a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Edith Cowan University and a Master of Fine Arts at Curtin University, choosing what she wanted to learn rather than following a set path. She is now completing Honours in Fine Arts at the University of Western Australia.

Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in Western Australia and France, including Crossroads at Ellis House, Bayswater (2026), Feminine Fragility at Moores Gallery, Fremantle (2025), Layer Cake at PS Art Space, Fremantle (2024), and Beyond the Surface at Curtin University, Bentley (2024), where she also stepped into the role of curator.