Oriana Julie is a post-disciplinary artist of African American and Italian ethnicity living and working on Kaurna Yatra in South Australia. Born as the first generation of her family outside the Mississippi Delta, her practice is shaped by the cultural, ecological and ancestral entanglements that inform this position. Oriana's work is grounded in what she terms Swamp Praxis, a living, undisciplined and embodied methodology that engages the swamp as both metaphor and navigational tool. Through this framework Oriana creates immersive environments that draw on diasporic cosmology, domestic space and ecological systems. Her material selections merge found materials with ceramics, food, performance, and collage, dissolving the boundaries between human and more-than-human worlds.

Oriana holds a Bachelor of Visual Art with First Class Honours from Adelaide Central School of Art, where she was awarded the 2025 Honours Scholarship. In 2026 she was selected as a finalist in the Alice Prize, where her work Alligator Dreaming in Crocodile Country explored crocodilian ecologies and cultural understandings that honour crocodiles as ancestor, kin and protector, countering the colonial imaginary that casts them as creatures of terror. She has exhibited widely across South Australia and interstate, including at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, the Samstag Museum of Art, Nexus Arts and the Araluen Arts Centre. She has undertaken residencies with Nexus Arts, Post Office Projects and The Mill, deepening her engagement with place and community ecologies. Her writing and work have been published in the Journal of Australian Ceramics and featured in Artlink, contributing to contemporary conversations around ecology, diaspora and material storytelling.

Her practice continues to evolve through experimentation, collaboration and research, building immersive environments that invite audiences into complex, affective encounters with history, ecology and embodiment.