Dorothy Napangardi was a Warlpiri woman from Mina Mina—a highly significant women's site near Lake Mackay in the Tanami Desert.  First introduced to painting in 1987 by her friend and fellow artist, Eunice Napangardi she painted Mina Mina without any traditional iconography from her familial lines creating her own innovative language to portray her country.  

Napangardi's own map-style paintings were formed by an intricate network of lines— colliding and imploding on top of each to create a play of tension and expansion—transporting the viewer through a myriad of intersections. 

In 2001, Napangardi won the 18th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. In 2002, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney held a solo exhibition of Napangardi's work titled Dancing Up Country.

In 2012 Dorothy became the first indigenous Australian artist to be accepted by Art Cologne, and in the same year her work was displayed in Ancestral Modern, an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. She was also represented in the 2012 Sydney Biennale.

Napangardi's ability to innovate, accept new challenges and reinvent herself also became evident in other recent collaborations, including one with the luxury Italian fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna. Dorothy Napangardi's work is included in many major collections, both public and private, in Australia, the US and Europe.