Max Sharam

Australian entertainer

Max Sharam is an Australian American multi disciplinary artist and singer songwriter. In the mid 1990s, Sharam had three top 40 hit singles in Australia, "Coma", "Be Firm" and "Lay Down", from her top 10 album A Million Year Girl (1995). She received eight nominations at the ARIA Music Awards of 1995; winning ARIA Award for Best Cover Art with Dominic O'Brien for the album.

Sharam spent several years travelling around Europe where she initially made a living from busking. Sharam, while based in Rome, was part of a bohemian community of artists that included Kurt Wenner known for his groundbreaking street art. Whilst performing in Florence, Italy, Carlo Picone, a RAI news journalist and producer, invited her to audition for Forza Venite Gente, a hit Italian rock opera, starring Oreste Lionello, for which she landed a lead role. blockquote|I did the TV spot to make a statement, because I thought it was fucking mad——all this mediocre stuff that goes on all over television. I thought, why doesn't anybody get up and represent my generation—that side of Australia that's so readily ignored? That compelled me to get on New Faces. All the phones started ringing after that. I was very lucky. – produced by Daniel Denholm and Nick Mainsbridge – with the song peaking at No. 14 on the ARIA Singles Chart during February 1995. "Coma" was voted the eighth most popular song on radio station, Triple J's Hottest 100 of 1994. Her debut album, A Million Year Girl, was released in May 1995, achieving gold accreditation The album spawned two more Top 40 singles, "Be Firm" (No. 25 in June) and "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" (a cover of Melanie Safka's song, which reached No. 36 in November). Sharam performed and produced the music for 2006 AFI award winning documentary Forbidden Lie$ and in 2007 wrote, performed and produced the closing credit song for Expired, a movie starring Samantha Morton, Jason Patric, Illeana Douglas and Teri Garr. In 2008 Sharam continued to tread new ground and experiment with platforms, creating video performance based art. She was invited to join the New York Foundation for the Arts, a not for profit arts organization, panel for Video Art. In February 2009 Sharam returned to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with her show Songs and Stories from My Suitcase. and followed it up with another more experimental production ″Bushpygmalion″ which featured Sharam's animated artworks in a semi autobiographical tale. In June, 2017 her performance art was part of an exhibit in Fabrik der Künste in Hamburg, Germany as part of a retrospective for German painter, Tania Jacobi and then in September 2018 as part of the inaugural Ballarat Biennale of Australia Art (BOAA).

Sharam is a Master of Fine Art (MFA) and studied Animation Direction at Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS, Sydney) before graduating from RMIT's Centre for Animation & Interactive Media (AIM) in 2011. In 2011 she was a finalist in the APRA Professional Development Awards and in 2013 The Vanda & Young Songwriting Competition. Sharam also created the music and sound design for the play Anaconda, which won 'Best Original Play' at Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2012. In 2012, Sharam launched a crowd funding campaign to raise funds to record new work with Grammy Award winning producer Malcolm Burn. The new EP, The Gods Envy "songs thematically linked – stories of young girls/women crashing through the safety net of society", was scheduled for an independent release in 2014. In 2014, Sharam supported Cyndi Lauper on Lauper's 'She's So Unusual' 30th Anniversary Tour. In April 2019, she performed "Society" at the APRA Music Awards of 2019. In 2020, Sharam portrayed the ghost of Jean Lee in the docudrama A Miscarriage of Justice based on the hanging of Ronald Ryan.