Rodney Pople was born in Launceston, Tasmania (1952) and has lived and worked in Sydney since the early 1980s. He studied photography at the University of Tasmania and postgraduate sculpture at the Slade School of Art, London and New York Studio School. He has been awarded international residencies in Paris and Beijing, where he was Australia’s first Asialink artist-in-residence at the Beijing Art Academy. In 2014 Pople staged a solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography and in 2022-23 a two-person exhibition with Euan Macleod at the Western Plains Cultural Centre, NSW. 

Pople has been a finalist several times in the Archibald and Doug Moran portrait prizes, and in recent years has won the Glover Art Prize, Sulman Prize, NSW Parliament Art Prize, Paddington, Mosman, Fisher’s Ghost and Kings School art prizes. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, the state galleries of NSW, Queensland and Western Australia, and Artbank, the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery and many other regional and university collections across Australia. His work is represented by Australian Galleries in Sydney and Melbourne, and Despard Gallery in Hobart.

In 2025 Pople joined a group of 10 artists on a tour of sites in Greece and Crete significant to Australia’s participation in WW2. His suite of paintings created in response to that research trip is included in the Lustre Force exhibition which will launch at the ANZAC Memorial, Sydney in May 2026 before touring to Mudgee Regional Gallery, Rocky Hill Memorial Gallery in Goulburn and Gosford Regional Gallery (NSW), and the Hellenic Museum, Melbourne.

Portrait photograph of Rodney Pople, taken at Mt Thermopyles, Greece by Robert Linnegar, 2025