Betty Kuntiwa Pumani was born near Perenti Bore. She grew up on her family’s homeland around Antara and Paralpi (Victory Well), nestled among the vast granite hills of the Everard Ranges. Betty comes from a strong family line of female artists. Her mother, Kunmanara (Milatjari) Pumani, was one of the founding members of Mimili Maku Arts, and her older sister Kunmanara (Ngupulya) Pumani was long-standing chairperson at the art centre and a revered painter in her own right.

Betty is best known for her energetic paintings using a unique visual language that expresses the beauty, power and resilience of the land. Her signature reds evoke the rocky desert country of Antara, while also suggesting the unmistakable energy that runs through country. Betty is known in Mimili as the local ngangkari (traditional healer), serving her community by removing harmful spirits presenting as pain from the body.

Betty has twice won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards’ General Painting Award (2015 and 2016), and has been awarded the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2017). In 2019 she won the Lex Fox Painting Award at Castlemaine Art Gallery. In 2021 she was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney to create a major work for the monumental exhibition “The National 4 : Australian Art Now”. At 10 x 3 metres this was the largest dot-painting created by any individual artist on the APY Lands, and is now held in the permanent collection of the MCA.