[2][3] Her father, Trevor, was a radiographer, and the family moved first to Darwin and then to Alice Springs in the early 1960s, as there was an outbreak of tuberculosis and X-rays were needed in regional communities all over the Northern Territory (NT).
[3] My younger brother, actor and doctor Jeremy Cumpston, was born in Darwin, before the family moved to a tiny French village called Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes in Manitoba, Canada, so that her father could take up an opportunity to study hospital administration.
[3] She was appointed founding artistic director of Tarnanthi, the biennial Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts festival held in Adelaide, in 2014.
[8][9] In January 2025 it was announced that Cumpston would be leaving AGSA to take up a new appointment as director of the University of Virginia's Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Charlottesville in the US.
[7] Cumpston built up her practice as an art photographer,[3] shooting on black-and-white film, which is then scanned and printed digitally on canvas before being hand-coloured[5] with either watercolour, oil paint, crayons, or pencils.
[5] In April 2024, Cumpston served on the jury for the A$60 million revitalisation of the National Gallery of Australia's three-hectare sculpture garden, alongside Philip Goad, Nick Mitzevich, and Teresa Moller.
[6] In the 2020 Queen's Birthday Honours, Cumpston was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for "service to the museums and galleries sector, and to Indigenous art".
[3] Upon the announcement of her departure from AGSA in January 2025, the gallery listed her many achievements, including the growth of its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art collection grew by more than 1,000 works under her 17-year leadership, and many major exhibitions.