Sarah Maslankiewicz completed her Advanced Diploma in Photography (Art Major) at Photography Studies College in Melbourne in 2015. She has since won a number of national and international photographic awards.

After working for the Nine Network across Australia for 20 years, she moved to rural Mansfield in the foothills of the Victorian Alps with her husband and two young children in 2016. Raising a family, finding rewarding work, and creating meaningful art are equally important to her and she tries to balance them all, a challenging task at times.

Sarah was raised on the central Queensland coast, spending most of her youth sailing with her parents and acquiring a deep respect for water. She continues to find hope and inspiration beneath its surface. Her photography explores water’s transformative qualities and the vulnerability of our existence in that underworld.

In her first series, What Dreams May Come, she experimented with refracted light, mixing bodies and coloured fabrics in an underwater setting. Maslankiewicz’s subjects were no synchronised swimmers or certified scuba divers, but instead her friends, family, and colleagues. She coaxed them to writhe around naked in a heated swimming pool, lighting them with a car battery-operated flounder light – a simple approach that reflected both her method (the painterly effect is completely natural) and the purity of her lifelong obsession with water. The results were chaotic but beautiful, and the work attracted international interest and praise.