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Grant Leigh Saunders
Grant Leigh Saunders is a Biripi (Aboriginal) emerging scholar, rapper, songwriter and documentary filmmaker. He graduated from the Australian Film TV and Radio School with an MA (Honours) in film and TV documentary in 2006, where he directed and produced his first award-winning Hip Hop film B.L.A.C.K.: An Aboriginal Song of Hip Hop. As an Indigenous TV producer for the ABC from 2007 to 2011, he produced over twenty broadcasted stories (NTRO’s) on Indigenous culture, society, history and politics from rural, urban and remote communities across Australia. Saunders completed his Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Technology, Sydney in 2021 focusing his creative work, a film documentary (yet to be released) entitled JustUS: Hip Hop and The Block and supporting exegesis on Australian Indigenous Hip Hop and the social justice issues it speaks back to. Saunders uses an auto-ethnographic lens as part of his bricolage approach to his theoretical framework and research methodology, drawing from his own experience, in this instance, as an Indigenous rapper to inform his work and to collaboratively engage his informants (co-researchers) in informal conversational interviews, a technique that he also employs successfully in his documentary filmmaking.
Contact: University of Newcastle, Callaghan Campus, University Drive, Callaghan NSW 2308, Australia.