Sienna Lake
2023
Dame Quentin Bryce AD CVO John Monash Scholar
MSc in Politics, Violence and Crime
Anthropology
University College London
United Kingdom
Sienna is a criminal lawyer living and working on Miriwoong Gajerrong country in Kununurra, a town in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia. She grew up in Sydney and moved to Canberra to study a Bachelor of Arts/Laws (Hons) at the Australian National University, after which she worked as Associate to the Chief Justice of the ACT Supreme Court. Sienna struggled to find real-world application of her legal studies until exposed to the injustices faced by Indigenous people in the criminal justice system. This exposure shaped the rest of her degree and focused her career ambitions on criminal law due to the field's emphasis on advocacy and rights, and the ability to assist clients who have been exposed to an elevated level of criminogenic factors. As a John Monash Scholar, she will build on her undergraduate degree which included law and anthropology, but as distinctly separate disciplines, by undertaking a Masters degree at UCL, which will see the utility of combining these disciplines to interrogate systems of power and social organisation.