About

Anita Lester is a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist working across film, painting, music, poetry, illustration and performance. Her practice is united by a deep commitment to storytelling, exploring themes of memory, identity, faith, folklore, longing and cultural inheritance through a diverse body of work that moves fluidly between disciplines.

Lester first came to prominence as the lead singer and songwriter of the indie rock outfit Lester the Fierce. Her debut solo EP, Erato (2020), established her as a distinctive voice within Australian independent music, with her interpretation of Leonard Cohen's You Want It Darker attracting international attention and public praise from Cohen himself. She followed this with a series of collaborations and the release of her quietly released full-length album, The Clown (2023). A new body of work is currently in production, with an upcoming collection of songs scheduled for release in late 2026.

As a filmmaker, Lester's work often centres on questions of history, identity and intergenerational memory. Her animated short film Noch Am Leben (I'm Still Alive), an intimate exploration of Holocaust trauma and inheritance, screened internationally at more than fifty film festivals and now resides in the permanent collections of institutions including Yad Vashem and the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. Her feature film projects include Song of Songs, produced by Jamie Bialkower and executive produced by Shekhar Kapur, and The White Pigeon, a romantic ghost drama announced by Deadline Hollywood. Alongside these projects, Lester maintains an active screenwriting practice, with multiple feature films, television series and literary adaptations currently in development.

Working primarily in oil paint, Lester's visual art practice spans portraiture, folklore, symbolism and Jewish cultural history. In 2024 she was commissioned to reimagine the centenary edition of Farmacopeia, the celebrated Yiddish work originally illustrated by Marc Chagall, released in conjunction with a major Chagall exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Australia. Her portrait practice has included commissions of musicians, cultural figures and community leaders, while her landmark series of Holocaust survivor portraits for the Melbourne Holocaust Museum was completed in early 2026. The collection received significant critical and community acclaim and has led to a forthcoming major museum exhibition exploring Jewish folklore, mythology and haunted cultural memory, to be announced.

Alongside her studio practice, Lester has emerged as one of Australia's most recognised contemporary courtroom artists. Since 2023 she has produced dozens of courtroom drawings documenting some of the nation's most significant criminal and legal proceedings. Her work gained international attention following her widely published and globally viral portrait of Erin Patterson during the Victorian mushroom poisoning trial, bringing renewed public attention to the disappearing craft of courtroom illustration. Her drawings have documented numerous high-profile cases including Malka Leifer, the Australian ISIS brides proceedings, the Bondi shooter, Greg Lynn and many of the most closely followed criminal matters in Australia in recent years. Characterised by their immediacy, humanity and psychological insight, her courtroom works have appeared across major Australian and international media outlets.

Lester is also an illustrator whose work has appeared in numerous books and publications, including Arnold Zable's The Glass Horse of Venice (Text Publishing). Her poetry has been published widely and often intersects with her work in music, film and visual art, creating a multidisciplinary practice in which image, text and sound continually inform one another.

Whether working with paint, song, film, ink or language, Anita Lester's work is concerned with the stories people inherit, the stories they choose to tell, and the ways culture survives across generations. Through an artistic practice that bridges contemporary Australia with older worlds of memory, folklore and imagination, she continues to build a body of work that is both deeply personal and culturally resonant.