Stephania Windholz Leigh is an Australian artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation and sound. Her work explores themes of migration, heritage, identity and the female form. As a first-generation Australian with Polish Jewish roots, she reflects on diasporic narratives, inherited memory, and cultural loss through food, humour and abstraction.

Windholz Leigh’s practice is grounded in the domestic and the everyday, often drawing from objects and stories passed down from her grandparents, Holocaust survivors who migrated to Australia after the war. Her works combine a flat painting style with bold colours and subtle undertones of discomfort, inviting viewers to linger with personal and collective tensions beneath the surface.

In 2025, she was invited to exhibit in Chutzpah: Spirit. Recollection. Self. at the Jewish Museum of Australia, opening 1 May.

Her 2023 solo exhibition Aren’t You Gonna Eat Your Gefilte Fish? in Melbourne reflected on culinary traditions, assimilation and the complexity of relationships – familial, cultural and personal. She often uses playful titles to draw audiences in, balancing levity with deeper reflections on disconnection and longing.

Previous exhibitions include Ich Piersi, Moje Piersi (Their Breasts, My Breasts) at FestivALT in Kraków, Poland (2019), which explored women’s experiences of sexual violence during WWII; Partial Figure (BBYG) at Bayside Gallery (2021); and Woman, Chair & Plate in BOOBED at ACU Gallery (2022), continuing her examination of the body, space and identity through an often culturally-specific, gendered lens.