Alex Kershaw completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in 2000, and a Master of Fine Art at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in 2010.

Kershaw uses video and photography to mediate intercultural exchange with people and communities from a specific place. In this process, everyday people become participants and collaborators in the production of the work. Quotidian rituals used to connect, to cope, and to acculturate, provide the subject matter for developing the choreography of people's individual 'performances'. The camera becomes a way of thinking—negotiating the lived experience of Kershaw's participants and his artistic re-imagining of place. Rather than recording 'reality' as it is given or manufacturing fictions—Kershaw provokes an alternative reality that is then documented. As a result his stylistic approach shifts between: performative, cinematic, and 'ethnographic' genres.

Kershaw conceives participation as productive entity in itself, where both subject and 'object' are defined through the doing of artistic praxis. In his work the amalgam of fact/fiction and 'rational'/libidinal is not necessarily a substitution of one-for-the-other, but kept in play—involving the production of a different kind of reality that could equally be a variation of realism or a new imaginary. In this process where meaning is provoked and implicated for his audience, participants are re-embodied within their own surroundings, shifting their perspectives, and revitalising their relationship to place.