Michael Buckley has lived his professional life as an artist. He began his career by studying Media at Rusden College of Advanced Education. Here he made his first major 16mm film called 'How Dr God Enters the World' (1977). In this film he combined live action, cartoons, collage and animation to critical acclaim. The trajectory of combining different media forms continued in his exploration of hand drawing and hand processing film, and his narrative-driven adventures in making 16mm films.
From the mid 1980s Michael was employed as an artist and filmmaker working for organisations focussed on disability rights in Australia. In this role he collaborated with people with disabilities to make many low budget films about their lives and their hopes for greater recognition, independence and acceptance. He joined START media arts and contributed to their creative production program by creating numerous collaborative and issues focused media works for gallery exhibitions. The major film to come out of this period was 'Witness' (1994) a powerful insight into the life of a child living in institutions. It was made with self-advocate and activist, John Harrowell. This film was commissioned by the ABC and received a number of awards including Best Film at the Bathurst Film Festival.
In the mid 90s Buckley began to explore email as a creative opportunity to tell and distribute the stories he was writing. Over the years he has continued this practice of writing and sending stories to friends and colleagues. These stories sometimes evolve into artist books with cartoon illustrations scattered through them. They were produced in limited editions in all shapes and sizes ranging from tiny hand bound books to A4 colour printed and commercially bound volumes. Michael Buckley was awarded an Australia Council Fellowship for writing in 2000.
Buckley completed a Masters in New Media at the AIM Centre at RMIT in 2000. This study was a major turning point in Michael's creative production. He brought a broad range of visual and media creative skills and ideas to the digital media environment and used this opportunity to joyfully explore the possibilities of digital production. During his time at RMIT he produced an animated work 'Forever Young' on the Omega computer and the CD ROM called The Swear Club. This interactive CD ROM was regarded as a uniquely individual exploration of disrupted narrative. It was widely celebrated with awards from Australian Teachers of Media, Film Victoria (ATOM) in 1995. It was selected in two critical international exhibitions of new media art. These were The CD ROM exhibition in Cannes France in 1996 which was an international showcase of interactive CD ROM works and the exhibition Burning the Interface: International Artists' CD-ROM (1996), which was curated by Mike Leggett and presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. In recognition of his trail-blazing work, Michael Buckley was awarded the Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship in New Media in 2002.
Since the mid 1980s Michael Buckley has been a member of the vocal performance group Arf Arf. This legendary and experimental group were Frank Lovece, Marissa Stirpe, Marcus Bergner and Michael Buckley. They were all writers, filmmakers and artists who came together to create vocal noise works that they wrote, rehearsed and performed with musical scores of their own devising. They have performed their works around the world to much interest and acclaim for decades. A boxed set of their vocal tracks, films and performances was produced by German company Rumpski Pumpski in 2012. The film, 'Thread of Voice' (1992) was made as a collaborative documentary by Arf Arf. It documented Arf Arf members at work in the process of creation. It was somewhat controversially awarded the Best Documentary Prize at the St Kilda Film Festival in 1993.
While living in the Netherlands in 2012 Buckley created large-scale cut out figures that he stuck straight on the walls. These artworks evolved into large cartoon figures drawn on brown paper and cut out. Assemblages of figures were created by attaching groups of figures directly on walls. He continued to explore cut outs during an artist residency in Dublin in 2014. Two exhibitions of his cutouts were later held at the FRISA gallery in Hamburg in 2014 and 2016. He continues to explore the possibilities of cut-outs and unusual narratives in his art practice. In August 2025 he is showing a large installation 'Substantia Nigra', in a group show at the Counihan Gallery in Brunswick.