About

Anita Lester is a multidisciplinary artist based in Melbourne, Australia, working across music, film, painting, poetry, and illustration. Her practice is grounded in storytelling first and foremost, resisting easy categorisation - marked by both a technical precision and a deep emotional intelligence that connects across forms.

Anita began her career as the lead singer of indie rock act Lester the Fierce, before releasing her debut solo EP Erato in 2020. Despite the onset of the pandemic, the songs found wide resonance - particularly her cover of Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, which was praised by Cohen himself and featured in television shows including The Walking Dead. She followed this with collaborations including Sun and Moon and Stars with Husky, and the release of her debut album The Clown in 2023 - an intimate reflection on grief, change, and desire, influenced by Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Carole King, and Kate Bush.

In film, her 2017 short Noch Am Leben (I’m Still Alive), an intimate exploration of Holocaust trauma, screened at over fifty international festivals and now resides in the permanent collections of institutions such as Yad Vashem and the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. Her feature film debut Song of Songs, produced by Jamie Bialkower and executive produced by Shekhar Kapur, was announced by Screen Australia and Jump Street Films in 2024. In 2024, Deadline Hollywood announced her second film in development, The White Pigeon.

As a painter, Anita’s work moves between folklore, portraiture, and symbolism. Her Yiddish collection Farmacopeia - originally illustrated by Marc Chagall - was reimagined by Anita for its centenary and launched in conjunction with a Chagall retrospective at the Jewish Museum of Australia. Her portrait work includes the official painting of Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and a growing series of Holocaust survivor portraits commissioned by the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, with 15 works slated for exhibition in 2025/26.

Alongside her creative work, Anita is one of Australia’s few practicing courtroom artists. Her sketches have appeared across major news platforms, capturing moments of national significance with a raw and immediate honesty, most notably Erin Patterson and Malka Leifer.

In 2024, she illustrated Arnold Zable’s The Glass Horse of Venice, published by Text Publishing. Her poetry - featured across over a dozen books - often accompanies her music and visual art. Her published collection Ode to Oz, released alongside Erato, demonstrates her lyrical voice: tender, political, and deeply rooted in Jewish identity.

Whether through image, word, sound, or line, Anita’s work continues to ask essential questions - about memory, faith, and how we carry culture through rupture and reinvention.