Gloria was from the Anmatyerre community, just north of Alice Springs. She is a significant figure in contemporary Indigenous Australian art. Gloria Petyarre won Australia’s longest running art prize, the Wynne Prize in 1999 with Leaves, being the first Aboriginal person to win one of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s major prizes. She travelled to Ireland, England and India in 1990 as part of the Utopia – A picture story exhibition. She held her first solo exhibition in 1991. She is represented in major Australian galleries such as the National Gallery of Australia. She is the niece of Emily Kngwarreye and the younger sister of Kathleen Petyarre, two noted Aboriginal artists. Gloria lived at the Utopia community after 1977, where she started batik painting, exhibiting in shows around Australia for ten years. She began work on the ‘Summer Project’ in 1989 which involved translating the batik paintings onto canvas. She was one of the founding members of this Utopia Women’s Batik Group. She paints several Dreamtime stories such as Pencil Yam, Bean, Emu and Mountain Devil Lizard and Small Brown Grass. Her paintings -monochromatic or multi-colored – are distinguishable for their well defined segments filled with curved lines, and evoke a strong rhythmic quality. Her style has evolved into abstract fields that represent leaves, grasses and bodypaint. Her work is represented in such collections as: The National Gallery of Australia, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Allen and Hemsley, The Victorian Museum, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Powerhouse Museum, Westpac Collection New York, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, The Holmes a Court Collection. In 1999, Gloria Petyarre was awarded the prestigious Wynne Prize for Landscape Painting. Gloria Petyarre passed away on 8th June, 2021, and remains Australia's most internationally renowned living female artist.