Adele Chynoweth trained and worked as a secondary arts teacher and has also had an extensive career in the arts and cultural sector, the Australian Public Service and academia. Adele’s action research promotes the importance of the role of the cultural sector in leading social change as well as the need for public representation for the Forgotten Australians (those institutionalised children who were not covered by inquiries into Former Child Migrants and the Stolen Generations).

At the National Museum of Australia, Adele was the co-curator of the touring exhibition Inside: Life in Children’s Home and Institutions. Chynoweth has presented her research at museum conferences in Australia, the UK, Europe and Latin America as well as TEDxCanberra. Chynoweth was also employed as a consultant for the Danish Museum project Welfare Stories: from the Edge of Society.

Adele provided research and on camera interviews for the documentary films Who Are the Forgotten Australians? (2011) and Westbrook (2014), for Foxtel’s Crime & Investigation channel. Adele was a lecturer within the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University, where she received the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Public Policy and Outreach. In 2020, Adele was admitted as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) and also received the Medal of the Order of Australia. 

Adele is the co-editor of Museums and Social Change: Challenging the Unhelpful Museum (2020) and the sole editor of Museums and the Working Class (2021). Her book Goodna Girls: a History of Children in a Queensland Mental Asylum(2020) comprises the research which informed her collaborative lobbying, with survivors, of the Queensland Government to pay financial redress to former child inmates of its adult psychiatric facilities. Adele is also the producer, writer and director of the feature documentary film Eight Twenty: Mark Opitz Remembers (2023).