Larissa Yasmin Behrendt AO FASSA FAHA FAAL (born 1969) is an Australian legal academic, writer, filmmaker and Indigenous rights advocate.

Her mother, who was non-Indigenous, worked in naval intelligence, while her father was an air traffic controller and later an Aboriginal Studies academic.

He established the Aboriginal Research and Resource Centre at the University of New South Wales, Sydney in 1988, around the time when Behrendt commenced studying there.

[3] After graduating from Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s, Behrendt worked in Canada for a year with a range of First Nations organisations.

[5] The same year, she did a study for the Slavey people comparing native title developments in Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

[16][3] In April 2011, Behrendt was appointed to chair the Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People for the federal government.

The Review, tasked with providing a roadmap for Indigenous university education, delivered its report in September 2012 and received a widely positive response for its emphasis on achievable parity targets and the re-allocation of existing resources to support meaningful outcomes such as "fostering a 'professional class' of Indigenous graduates".

[3] In 2016 Behrendt (as director) Michaela Perske (writer and producer) and were awarded the Indigenous Feature Documentary Initiative funding by the Adelaide Film Festival in conjunction with Screen Australia and KOJO to work on their feature documentary project, After the Apology,[33][34] and on 9 October 2017, AFF held the world première of the resulting film.

It was deliberately broadcast around the same time that the drama series Operation Buffalo was on, to give voice to the Indigenous people of the area and show how it disrupted their lives.

[42] The film shows the resilience of the Maralinga Tjarutja people,[43] and how they have continued to fight for their rights to look after the contaminated land.

[44] In 2020 Behrendt worked as a writer for Season 2 of Total Control (TV series),[3] and as writer/director on a documentary film entitled The Fight Together.

[45] Behrendt worked on, and released the documentary One Mind, One Heart in 2024,[46] which follows the long political campaigns to preserve culture and maintain Aboriginal land rights, through the story of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions.

Behrendt presents radio programme Speaking Out, covering "politics, arts and culture from a range of Indigenous perspectives".

[63] The disparagement of Behrendt was subsequently characterised as a coordinated response to a court case in which she and eight others were simultaneously involved against News Corp,[62] known as Eatock v Bolt.