Nigel Killalea was born in Wagga Wagga. His childhood and adolescence were spent living and working on the land. He studied at the Canberra School of Arts for three years then moved to Melbourne where he completed a two year Postgraduate Degree at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1990.

For many years Nigel has been exhibiting landscape paintings as Frontier that describe symbols of his geographic identity. He is an artist with strong interest in the narrative of landscape.

His paintings and drawings retrace and investigate paths of a personal journey, a constructed history of the past and present which explore the perimeters of habitation and abandonment and the stories told or imagined within the landscape.