Jenna Mayilema Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman, and KarraJarri woman with Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Anglo-Australian (Irish and Scottish) ancestry. Her practice centres on exploring language, materiality, and the transformation of inherited narratives. Deeply intrigued by what is lost in translation, Lee explores the spaces between words—the felt but unseen—capturing the subtleties that surround language. Her work channels these overlooked nuances into immersive installations, works on paper, sculpture, and multimedia. 

Working primarily with books, viewed as colonial artefacts, Lee interrogates dictionaries that have poorly combined First Peoples languages alongside Larrakia linguistics, using them to better describe the world she sees around her. Through meticulous deconstruction and reconstruction, she engages with materials that echo the past, revealing the hidden stories they carry. Her work seeks to uncover the unseen forces shaping our understanding of history and identity, drawing attention to what time has eroded and collective memory has suppressed.