Emily Thornton is an Aboriginal Australian musician, writer, editor, and community arts practitioner whose work centres cultural revitalisation, storytelling, and connection to place. Currently based in Kjipuktuk on unceded Mi’kma’ki land, her creative and research practices focus on decolonising traditionally colonial spaces and artistic traditions, particularly within Western classical music and arts institutions.

Working across music, writing, and editorial practice, Emily takes an interdisciplinary and critically engaged approach to examining how institutions, performance traditions, and cultural industries continue to reproduce colonial power structures. Her work also actively explores pathways for ethical, culturally grounded transformation, with an emphasis on relational practice, accountability, and community-led ways of working.

Emily is also a creative writer producing multilingual work across poetry, song, and narrative forms, including writing and singing in her ancestral language as part of an ongoing commitment to cultural renewal and intergenerational knowledge sharing. Her creative practice is deeply grounded in community and Country, and prioritises care, continuity, and cultural responsibility.

Alongside her creative work, Emily is a freelance arts journalist contributing Indigenous perspectives to Australia’s cultural discourse. Her writing has been published in National Indigenous Times and Limelight, Australia’s leading arts magazine, where she covers music, performance, and arts policy through a decolonial and community-informed lens. Her journalism foregrounds First Nations voices and critically interrogates questions of representation, ownership, and cultural labour within the arts.