Angus McDonald

Angus McDonald (born 1961) is an Australian contemporary visual artist, refugee advocate, columnist, and documentary filmmaker.

Early life and education Angus McDonald was born in Sydney in 1961. He earned an Economics degree at the University of Sydney, and later (1993–5) studied painting at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney. He travelled to the small island of Leros, Greece and lived and painted there from 1996 to 1999.

Art McDonald was a visual artist, mainly a painter (although he didn't use a paintbrush until he was 31), for around 25 years before he started making films, from around 2017. In 2011, he painted Ann Lewis In 2019, he painted lawyer, writer, and former refugee Mariam Veiszadeh In 2024, he painted Marcia Langton

Film and social advocacy In 2016, McDonald became interested in human rights and refugee issues after travelling across the Greek islands (including Leros, where he had lived a couple of decades earlier) to see how the local communities dealt with the huge numbers of asylum seekers who had arrived in 2015 and 2016 via the Mediterranean Sea, mainly from Syria via Turkey. He was struck by the more humane way that the Greeks treated these huge numbers of migrants, compared with the Australian Government's treatment of the relatively few who had arrived by boat in Australian territorial waters. It includes a poem called "Manus Poem" written and narrated in Farsi by Behrouz Boochani, a prominent Kurdish Iranian former asylum seeker held on Manus Island. It was an official selection for the 2020 Byron Bay International Film Festival and the 2020 Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASFFest) in York, England, qualifying the film for entry into the 2020 Oscars Documentary Short category by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.