Siobhan Angus, External Member

Siobhan Angus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at Carleton University, specializing in the history of photography and the environmental humanities. Her research explores the intersections of visual culture with the histories of capitalism and labor, settler colonialism, environmental degradation, and the history of science, with a particular focus on how cultural practices can support movements for environmental and social justice. She holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from York University, where her award-winning dissertation examined how photography chronicled, celebrated, and contested the transformations enacted by extractive capitalism and settler colonialism on the Canadian Shield. For this work, she was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Her scholarship has appeared in Environmental Humanities, Transbordeur, and October, as well as in edited volumes including Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and Frederic Church: Global Artist (Yale University Press, 2026). Her book Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press, 2024) traces the mineral history of photography through the lenses of materiality and environmental justice. Camera Geologica was awarded the 2024 Photography Network Book Prize and was a finalist for College Art Association’s 2025 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. 

Charles Acland, Associate Member

Charles Acland is Distinguished University Research Professor in Communication Studies at Concordia University. He is author of Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Duke UP, 2003), Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of ‘Youth in Crisis’ (Westview/Perseus, 1995), and Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence (Duke UP, 2012) and most recently American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder (Duke UP, 2020). He is editor of Residual Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions (McGill-Queen’s UP, 1999) with William Buxton, and Useful Cinema (Duke UP, 2011) with Haidee Wasson. With Katie Russell, Acland edits the Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques.

Annmarie Adams, External Member

Annmarie Adams is an architectural historian specializing in the intersections of medicine, gender, and the built environment. She holds the Stevenson Chair in the Philosophy and History of Science, including Medicine, at McGill University in Montreal.  Adams is jointly appointed in the School of Architecture and Department of Social Studies of Medicine (SSoM). Her books include Architecture in the Family Way (MQUP, 1996); Designing Women (UTP, 2000), and Medicine by Design (UMP, 2007). She is currently writing a “spatial biography” of cardiologist and museum curator Maude Abbott, funded by SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada).

Janice Anderson, Associate Member

Janice Anderson completed her MA (1995, Art History) and her PhD (2002, SIP) at Concordia University. She worked from 2000 to 2014 as the Faculty of Fine Arts Visual Resources Curator in the Digital Image and Slide Collection, retiring in 2014. In 2000 she curated, with Dr. Brian Foss, the exhibition Quiet Harmony: The Art of Mary Hiester Reid for the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is an Affiliate in the Art History Department and has taught a variety of courses, including Feminism and Art History, A History of Women Artists, and Beyond Disney: Popular Culture in Print. She also teaches a graduate seminar in pedagogy. In conjunction with Melinda Reinhart, Fine Arts Librarian, Concordia University, and Kristina Huneault, Concordia Research Chair, Department of Art History, she co-founded the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. The Initiative has developed a Documentation Centre devoted to Canadian women artists born before 1925, and several online research tools. The Initiative held an inaugural conference in 2008 and published a collection of essays, Rethinking Professionalism: Essays on Women and Art in Canada in 2012. A second conference took place in May 2012 and the resulting publication was a special issue of the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien 34:2 (2013). In May 2015 the third conference took place in Kingston, Ontario, as a collaborative project between Concordia University, Queen’s University and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre with the accompanying publication, The Artist Herself, authored by many of the conference speakers. 

Alen Buis, External Member

Alena Buis, PhD is an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Surrey, BC). She received an MA in Art History from Concordia University in 2008, followed by a PhD in Art History from Queen’s University in 2013.  Buis contributed chapters to Early Modern Women: Remapping Routes and Spaces (2015), Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970 (2012), Depicting Canada's Children (2009) and a co-edited anthology Craft, Community and the Material Culture of Place and Politics, 19^th-20^th Century (2014) as well as  articles for The Journal of Modern Craft, Dutch Crossing, Material Culture Review, Inuit Art Quarterly, and Cahiers métiers d'art*Craft Journal. Her recent publications on pedagogy include a chapter on open educational practices in An Educator’s Handbook for Teaching about the Ancient World, a post for Art History Teaching Resources Weekly and a special issue of the Sixteenth Century Journal “Teaching the Early Modern in the Era of COVID-19”. Buis is also one of the founders of Open Art Histories (OAH) a SSHRC-funded collective, committed to building a generative and supportive national network for teaching art history and addressing pressing pedagogical challenges, including globalizing practices, decolonizing the discipline and using open education to advance accessibility and inclusion. She and the other core members of Open Art Histories co-authored of CanadARThistories: Reimagining the Canadian Art History Survey, an online course and associated open textbook reframing and rewriting the narratives of art in Canada.   

Carolyn Butler-Palmer, External Member

Carolyn Butler Palmer is Associate Professor and Williams Legacy Chair in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Victoria. The Williams Chair is also endowed in recognition of the Legacy Gallery at the University of Victoria in the area of modern and contemporary art of the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Butler Palmer’s program of research emerges at the intersections between visual histories and issues in human rights, and especially the rights of Indigenous people. Questions about looking relations and the politicization of aesthetic relations significantly inform her research, as does challenging assumptions about the production of art historical knowledge and processes of knowledge mobilization. She is particularly interested in dark heritage and the preservation of intangible value systems with respect to the arts of the Pacific Northwest. Much of her research is intended to nourish the needs of community members. Dr. Butler Palmer has recently published articles in the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien and the Journal of the Surrealism in the Americas. She is currently working on a book manuscript “From Ellen Newman Neel to Ellen Neel Newman: A Portrait of a Kwagiutl Family of Artists, 1916-2016.” This book project focuses on Ellen Neel (1916-1966), who is usually credited with being the first woman carver, and subsequent generations of artists that descend from her eldest son David Neel, Sr. (1937-1961). Dr. Butler Palmer’s academic affiliation with the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, a research space and home of the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien, plays a vital link between her program of research in the arts of the Pacific Northwest and art historical debates across Canada.

Sébastien Caquard, Associate Member

Sébastien Caquard is a full professor in the department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University and the lead co-director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. His research lies at the intersection between mapping, technologies and the humanities. In his current work, he seeks to explore how maps can help to better understand the complex relationships that exist between places and narratives. This research involves the mapping of a range of narratives such as feature films, life stories from refugees and from Indigenous people. As the director of the Geomedia lab, he has led the development of Atlascine, an online mapping application designed to map stories, and he is involved in a variety of innovative projects that require alternative ways of thinking cartographically. He is also a founding member of the MappingBack collective and the former chair of the Commission on “Art and Cartography” of the International Cartographic Association (ICA). As the graduate program director of the Master of Environmental Assessment he is deeply concerned by environmental issues and has been actively involved in implementing a flying less policy in the department of Geography, Planning and Environment.

Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere, External Member

Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere received her PhD from the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University (2016). She received a BA in Art History from Mount Allison University (2007) followed by an MA in Art History from York University (2009). Her research interests center on the Canadian photographic landscape and the possibility of a Canadian national aesthetic therein and looks towards topographical survey photographs of the 19th century as markers of an early Canadian identity and aesthetic in landscape photography. Her dissertation, “Mediated Landscape/Mediating Photographs: Surveying the Landscape in Nineteenth-century Canadian Topographical Photography,” reclaims the images produced by four survey photographers for the collective imaginary by considering photographs as both mediated and mediating in their ability to bridge and accommodate a nexus of antithetical readings – maker and viewer, authorial intent and discursive function, art and document, subjective and objective, land and landscape. Her interest in interdisciplinary approaches to Canadian art, photograph, and history is reflected in her published writing. For example her examination of photographic histories of the city and the self-identification of its citizens therein in the Journal of Canadian Studies (2016); and examining the ways in which Americans and Canadians were instructed to learn about Canada through tourist books in Histoire Sociale/Social History (2016). Her research is also published in Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies (2017), in RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review (2016), and in the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien (2014). She is an active member of the University Art Association of Canada, the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, the Network in Canadian History and Environment, and the American Society for Environmental History. In 2012 Elizabeth was awarded a Lisette Model/Joseph G. Blum Fellowship in the History of Photography to pursue her research at the National Gallery of Canada. In 2015 her dissertation was awarded the Michel de la Chenelière Prize by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In 2017 she was a Jarislowsky Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

Cynthia Cooper, External Member

Cynthia Cooper is Head, Collections and Research, and Curator, Dress, Fashion and Textiles at the McCord Museum. She holds an M.S. in Historic Costume and Textiles from the University of Rhode Island. She is a three-time recipient of the Richard Martin Exhibition Award from the Costume Society of America, most recently in 2018 for Fashioning Expo 67, in 2009 for Reveal or Conceal? and in 2003 as a member of the curatorial team of Clothes Make the MAN. She has taught courses on the intersections between fashion and art, and on fashion history, textile history and material culture in Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, and on fashion history at LaSalle College. Her research centres dress and fashion that have become entangled with Canadian identity projects. She is the impetus behind EncycloFashionQC, the unique online encyclopedic reference for the history of fashion in Quebec.

Mireille Eagan, External Member

Mireille Eagan is Curator of Contemporary Art at The Rooms in St. John’s, NL. She was previously the curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, PEI, where she was a founding member of that province’s artist-run collective “This Town Is Small.” Eagan has curated more than 100 exhibitions, individually or as co-curator, including the nationally touring retrospective “Mary Pratt” and “Mary Pratt: This Little Painting” at the National Gallery of Canada (that institution’s first solo exhibition of an Atlantic Canadian woman artist), as well as the Terra Nova Art Foundation’s Collateral Project at the 55th Venice Biennale. She received a Digital Publishing Awards Gold Medal in 2018 and the Critical Eye Award from VANL-CARFAC in 2017 and 2022. Eagan is the editor and lead of the publication, Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador, winner of the 2022 Atlantic Book Awards Best Atlantic-Published Book and recipient of Honourable Mentions from the Canadian Museums Association and Melva J. Dwyer Award. She holds the position of President of the Atlantic Provinces Art Gallery Association. Eagan has written for publications including Border Crossings, C Magazine, Canadian Art, The Globe and Mail, Visual Arts News, and Inuit Art Quarterly and has lectured nationally and internationally.

Tammer El-Sheikh, External Member

Tammer El-Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Art History at York University in Toronto. Previously he taught at Concordia University in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Since completing his PhD at McGill in 2013, Tammer has developed research and teaching interests in tandem. His dissertation and scholarly publications have focused on the impact of postcolonial criticism and theory on contemporary art and modern and contemporary art history. In addition to introductory courses in Art History and Cultural Studies he has lead senior undergraduate and graduate-level seminars in Postcolonial Theory and Art History, Art and Politics of the Middle East, Art of the 1960s in Europe and America, Global Contemporary Art and Ideas, Methods in Art History, Critical Methods and Practices, and the History and Practice of Art Criticism. In his posts at York and Concordia he has worked closely with both studio art and art history students, very often in the same classes. This has enabled Tammer to develop curriculum that is both historically grounded and keyed to developments in contemporary art. It has also provided opportunities for fruitful exchanges and collaborations between studio artists and art historians within and between his classes. Since his undergraduate days at the University of Toronto Tammer has maintained a practice as an art critic as well. He has written feature articles and reviews for Parachute, C Magazine, ETC Magazine and Canadian Art, and longer essays for a number of exhibition catalogues both in Canada and abroad. Most recently he contributed an essay to Berlin-based, Canadian artist Shannon Bool’s monograph Shannon Bool: Bombshell (Verlag fur moderne Kunst, 2019). He is currently working on a review essay of the National Gallery of Canada’s international Indigenous art exhibition Abadakone: Continuous Fire for Border Crossings. In the past few years he has written around thirty reviews of contemporary art exhibitions as a Montreal and Toronto correspondent for the website Akimbo.

Brian Foss, External Member

Brian Foss holds a MA from Concordia University and a doctorate from the University of London. From 1988 to 2009 he was a full-time faculty member in Concordia University’s Department of Art History, and also served as Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs in that university’s Faculty of Fine Arts (2002-2009). In 2009 he moved to Carleton University, where he is Professor of Art History, and the director of the School for Studies in Art and Culture. He has taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, especially in Canadian art. Over the course of his teaching career he has supervised some forty MA theses as well as a dozen PhD dissertations. In 2003 he was the recipient of that year’s Distinguished Teaching Award from Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Foss’s two principal areas of research are Canadian art from c.1870 to c.1970, and Canadian and international war art. His 2007 monograph War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939-45 (Yale University Press) was one of six books short-listed for that year’s William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History. However, most of his many essays, book chapters and exhibition catalogue essays have focused on Canadian art. He has also curated or co-curated a number of thematic as well as monographic exhibitions. Recent work includes major shows of the work of Mary Hiester Reid (co-organized with Janice Anderson for the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2000) and Edwin Holgate (with Rosalind Pepall for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2005), and a comprehensive exhibition devoted to the Beaver Hall Group and 1920s modernism in Montreal (with Jacques Des Rochers for the MMFA, 2015). From 1996 to 2011 Foss served as associate editor of the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien, where since 2011 he has been the Chair of the Advisory Board. He has also been co-editor of RACAR: Revue d’art canadien/Canadian Art Review (2001-2012). From 1999 to 2002 he was the vice-president of the Universities Art Association of Canada, and was the winner of the 2013 UAAC Recognition Award.

Lynda Gammon, External Member

Lynda Gammon is an artist, curator and scholar. She is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria. A significant area of Lynda Gammon’s artistic production over the past several decades has dealt with the subject of space/place, which she has explored through installation works employing sculptural and photographic elements. Her work is positioned between the flat illusionistic space of photography and the volumetric physical space of sculpture. She is interested in the differences and connections that occur when represented space (i.e., the photograph) and presented space (i.e. the sculpture) meet. Lynda Gammon’s work has been exhibited at institutions including The Nickle Art Museum (Calgary), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Mercer Union Gallery (Toronto), Plug-In Gallery (Winnipeg), Presentation House Gallery (Vancouver), Vancouver Art Gallery, McMaster Museum (Hamilton), Simon Fraser Gallery (Burnaby), Gallery 44 (Toronto), Gallery 101 (Ottawa), The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Galerie Jorge Alyskewycz (Paris), The Westergasfabreik, (Amsterdam), Salle de Bains (Rotterdam), Stride Gallery (Calgary), Platform centre for photographic + digital arts (Winnipeg), Vu, centre de diffusion et de production de la photographie (Quebec City), Oakville Galleries (Oakville ON); The Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge), The Legacy Gallery (Victoria), The Slide Room Gallery (Victoria), the Equinox Gallery (Vancouver) and The Victoria Arts Council. In 2004 Gammon established flask an independent press dedicated to the production and publication of books by Canadian artists and writers. Gammon considers flask a curatorial project where she works collaboratively with artists and writers in the realization of art and poetic projects in book form. In addition Gammon has also curated gallery exhibitions of Canadian artists in exhibitions such as Work’PLACE‘ (Open Space, 2014), co-curated Realities Follies (Open Space, 2015) and curated the absence of the origin of its likeness (Open Space, 2016). Gammon has been the recipient of numerous BC Arts Council and Canada Council grants, is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and serves on the board of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande, External Member

Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande is an art historian whose research and curatorial practice focus on regional photography, Canadian art and material culture. He is currently director-curator of the Colby-Curtis Museum. He holds master and bachelor degrees in art history from Université du Québec à Montréal and pursues a PhD in art history at Concordia University, where he was a Jarislowsky Foundation Doctoral Fellow. His doctoral research investigates the immense photographic production of the Service de cinéphotographie du Québec, a forgotten provincial government agency who produced some 150 000 pictures between 1940 and 1961. His recent curatorial projects include Bêtes et Bestiaire – Animals from the Colby-Curtis collection (Colby-Curtis Museum, 2020), River Crossings. An Aesthetic exploration of covered bridges photographs (Colby-Curtis Museum, 2019) and St-Francis and its affluents (Colby-Curtis Museum, 2019). His texts have been published in Ciel Variable magazine and the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien. He sits on various boards and committees, notably the Commission du patrimoine et de la muséologie de l'Estrie and Tourisme Memphrémagog. 

Dominic Hardy, External Member

Dominic Hardy s’est joint au département d’histoire de l’art de l’UQAM en décembre 2008. Diplômé en histoire de l’art (PhD, Concordia), en études canadiennes interdisciplinaires (MA, Trent University) et en arts plastiques (BFA, Concordia), il est spécialiste de la caricature et de la circulation de l’image satirique au Québec (18^e-20^e siècles). Il a longtemps été impliqué dans l’éducation muséale, d’abord en Ontario à l’Art Gallery of Peterborough (1989-1998) et au Musée des beaux-arts du Canada (1998-99), et ensuite au Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (1999-2008). Ses activités d’enseignement couvrent l’histoire des arts visuels sur les territoires regroupés sous les notions de Québec, Canada depuis la période de Contact jusqu’au 20^e siècle, l’histoire de l’image satirique, la muséologie, les idées de narration et d’histoire dans l’histoire de l’art. Ses activités de recherche et de publication cherchent à fédérer des communautés de chercheur.e.s, à la fois établi.e.s et de la relève, autour de projets collaboratifs. Ainsi ont vu le jour les ouvrages collectifs Quand la caricature sort du journal : Baptiste Ladébauche 1876-1967 (avec Micheline Cambron, Fides 2015), Sketches from an Unquiet Country : Canadian Graphic Satire 1840-1940 (avec Annie Gérin et Lora Senechal Carney, MQUP 2018) et L’image railleuse. La satire visuelle du 18^e siècle à nos jours (avec Laurent Baridon et Frédérique Desbuissons, INHA 2019). Depuis 2014, Dominic dirige les activités du Laboratoire numérique des études en histoire de l’art du Québec à l’UQAM, dont la publication numérique Le Carnet. Histoires de l’art du Québec voit le jour en 2016.

Steven High, Associate Member

Steven High is an interdisciplinary historian with a strong interest in working-class studies, immigration and forced migration, and oral and public history. His research interests have focused on four principal areas. First, he has published extensively on the history of deindustrialization and the post-industrial transformation of North American cities. His first book, Industrial Sunset: the Making of North America’s Rust Belt (2003), won awards from the American Historical Association, the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, and the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences. This was followed by Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (2007). He and PhD student, Lachlan MacKinnon, have submitted an edited collection, Deindustrialization & Its Aftermath to UBC Press. He has also co-produced two audio walks of the post-industrial Lachine Canal and the Pointe-Saintt-Charles district of Montreal. Among his current projects, is the pan-Canadian On the Move Project (PI - Barb Neis) that is examining employment mobility. His second area of expertise focuses on oral accounts of mass violence. Steven High led Montreal Life Stories, a seven year long project (2005-12) funded by SSHRC’s CURA program that recorded the life stories of Montrealers displaced by mass violence. Steven High co-edited (with Ted Little and Thi Ry Duong), Remembering Mass Violence (UTP, 2013), edited Beyond Testimony and Trauma (UBC, 2015), and authored Oral History at the Crossroads (UBC, 2014). His third area of expertise relates to oral history methodology, ethics and digital technologies. As co-director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, he is part of a diverse interdisciplinary community-of-practice. He has published extensively in this field. He is currently finishing a book project with Liz Miller (communications) and Ted Little (theatre) on Going Public with research. He is currently active in several new projects examining the intersections of oral history and oral literature (Jason Camlot, PI Spoken Web Project; and the mapcollab project with Julie-Anne Boudreau and David Austin. Finally, Steven High has published extensively on the socio-economic and military history of World War II. He has written extensively on the wartime experience of the “base colonies” of Newfoundland, Bermuda, Trinidad, Guyana, Antigua, St. Lucia, Jamaica and the Bahamas. This project has resulted in a monograph, Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009), as well as an edited collection, Occupied St John’s: A Social History of a City At War (McGill-Queen’s UP) – which was given Honourable Mention for the C.P. Stacey Prize in Canadian Military History.

Heather Igloliorte, External Member

Heather lgloliorte (Inuk-Newfoundlander, Nunatsiavut) is an internationally-renowned curator and art historian whose work centres circumpolar Inuit and other Indigenous arts and knowledges within global art contexts such as contemporary art exhibitions, public art installations, museum collecting practices, and new media art and film productions. Her research foregrounds Indigenous perspectives and creativity, with a particular emphasis on the training and mentoring of Indigenous youth from remote and northern communities, while focusing on decolonizing institutions and challenging colonialist understandings of resilience, health, resources, and technologies. She holds a PhD in Cultural Mediations and a Master of Arts, Canadian Art History, from Carleton University and a BA of Fine Arts, with a Major in Fine Art, and a Minor in Art History from NSCAD. She has been an independent curator since 2005 and has created or co-created more than 30 curatorial projects throughout her career. Her first major exhibition, the oral history project “We Were So Far Away”: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools (2008-, Ottawa, Legacy of Hope Foundation), is still in circulation across Canada today. Other notable exhibitions include ARCTIC XR/ ARCTIC AR (2022), which was presented in conjunction with Árran 360° at the Sami Pavilion of the Venice Biennale and toured across Canada and internationally; the Memory Keepers series (2019-2020); Among All These Tundras (2018-2021); Decolonize Me (2011-2015); and SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut, the first nationally-touring exhibition of her region, which toured across Canada (2016-2020) and was awarded the 2017 Award of Outstanding Achievement in Education from the Canadian Museums Association. Until 2023, she held the Tier 1 University Research Chair in Circumpolar Indigenous Arts and was an associate professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. At Concordia, Heather co-directed the Indigenous Futures Research Centre and directed the nation-wide Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership: The Pilimmaksarniq / Pijariuqsarniq Project (2018-2025), an initiative that supports Inuit postsecondary students to explore professional career paths in all aspects of the arts, including collections management, curatorial practice, arts administration and other areas of the visual and performing arts, in order to address the longstanding absence of Inuit in agential positions within Canadian art history and museum practice. In recognition of her significant contributions to curatorial practice in Canada, in 2021 Igloliorte was both awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation's Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, and became the first Indigenous person to receive a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal.

Bill Kirby, External Member

Founder and Executive Director of the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art (CCCA) and creator of the Canadian Art Database Project, Bill Kirby is the former Head of the Canada Council Art Bank and was a Visual Arts Officer responsible for the Council’s Program of Assistance to Art Galleries and Artist-Run Spaces. He is a former Director of the Edmonton Art Gallery, Professor of Contemporary Canadian Art and Director of Gallery 1.1.1., at the School of Art, University of Manitoba; and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. He has also been a lecturer at Ryerson University and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Art at York University in Toronto. Over the past many years, he has advised and served on the Boards of a number of arts organizations - including the Canadian Conference of the Arts, the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization, the Canadian Museums Association, the Western Canada Art Association, the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, The Artists Foundation, and the OnDisc Alliance. He was a member of the Acquisition Committee of the Portrait Gallery of Canada and is a recipient of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for distinguished contributions to the visual arts in Canada. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Contemporary Canadian Art from the University of British Columbia.

August Klintberg, External Member

August Klintberg is an artist who works in the field of art history. He is represented by Pierre François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal, Canada, and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta University of the Arts (AUArts). He earned his PhD in Art History at Concordia University in 2013, where he was also an Assistant Professor, LTA. In 2010 he conducted PhD research at Oxford University, St Peter's College, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He completed his MA at Concordia University (2008), his BFA at the Alberta College of Art & Design (2001), and was an exchange student at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (1999-2000). He is also an International Counselor for the V&A Waterfront / Zeitz MOCAA Curatorial Training Programme (Cape Town, South Africa). His research interests include installation, artist's cinema, edible art practices, sensory design in museums, and queer theory.

Marissa Largo, External Member

Marissa Largo (she/her) is an assistant professor of Creative Technologies in the School of Art, Media, Performance & Design of York University. Her research/research-creation focuses on the intersections of community engagement, race, gender, and Asian diasporic cultural production. Her forthcoming book, Unsettling Imaginaries: Filipinx Contemporary Artists in Canada (University of Washington Press) examines the work and oral histories of artists who imagine Filipinx subjectivity beyond colonial logics. She is co-editor of Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and a guest co-editor of the Beyond Canada 150: Asian Canadian Visual Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill Press, 2018). Since 2018, she has served as the Canada Area Editor of the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA). Dr. Largo is the recipient of numerous awards and grants for her research and creative practice. In 2013, she was awarded the prestigious Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and is a recipient of the 2019 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Research on the Education of Asian and Pacific Americans (REAPA) special interest group of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). In 2021, she was awarded an Ontario Arts Council Grant for Curatorial Projects: Indigenous and Culturally Diverse and a Canada Council for the Arts grant: Arts Across Canada Program for her curatorial project Elusive Desires: Ness Lee & Florence Yee at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham (September 2021 to January 2022). Elusive Desires was recognized by the 2022 Galeries Ontario/Ontario Galleries (GOG) Awards for best exhibition design and installation and best curatorial writing.  At present, Dr. Largo is part of a team developing the new Creative Technologies BFA program at the York University Markham Campus, which will open its doors in Summer 2024. Her projects have been presented in venues and events across Canada, such as the A Space Gallery (2024, 2023, 2022, 2017 & 2012), Open Gallery of OCAD University (2015), Royal Ontario Museum (2015), WorldPride Toronto (2014), The Robert Langen Art Gallery (2013), Nuit Blanche in Toronto (2019, 2018, 2012 and 2009), and MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) (2007). She also collaborates with community organizations that connect policy engagement with creative and social practice. From 2006 to 2020, Dr. Largo honed her love for teaching as a secondary visual arts educator. She has previously taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) University, where she was awarded the OCAD University Teaching Award for Continuing Studies and Non-Tenured Faculty in 2020. From 2020 to 2021, Dr. Largo was an assistant professor in Art Education, in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at NSCAD University. In 2023, she was awarded, Emerging Leader award in recognition of outstanding alumni who are committed to pursuing excellence in education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and the York University Research Award for Artistic & Creative Accomplishments from the President and the Vice-President of Research & Innovation of York University.
Dr. Largo welcomes graduate students whose research falls within Asian diasporic cultural production, Filipinx studies, particularly in the visual art, decolonial aesthetics, radical curation, virtual curation, queer studies, community-based art education, and research-creation.

Vincent Lavoie, External Member

Vincent Lavoie est professeur au département d’histoire de l’art de l’UQAM depuis 2005. C’est à l’université d’Ottawa (1989-1992) tout d’abord qu’il enseigne l’histoire de la photographie, avant d’exercer cette même activité à l’université Paris viii puis à Paris I (1993-1998), parallèlement à un travail de critique et de rédacteur pour les magazines d’art contemporain. Conservateur adjoint de la photographie (2000-2001) au Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, conservateur de recherche (2001-2005) au sein du Musée McCord, commissaire général du Mois de la Photo à Montréal (2003), il réalise des expositions portant aussi bien sur la photographie contemporaine que sur les pratiques amateur et vernaculaires. Vincent Lavoie est membre régulier de figura, centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire. Chercheur au sein de l’Observatoire de l’imaginaire contemporain (OIC), il y tient un carnet sur les recherches et curiosités photographiques.

Anton Lee, External Member

Anton Lee, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Philosophy at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Halifax. Lee specializes in the history and theory of photography, focusing primarily on the period from the early 20th century to the present from a global perspective. His research interests include: photographic multiples in sequential or serial forms; the epistemology of the photobook; photography’s relationship with text and narrative; the institutionalization and critical discourse of photography circa 1970s; critical theory and poststructuralism in the global setting. Before joining NSCAD, Lee taught at the University of British Columbia, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, McGill University, and the University of Houston. Most recently in 2024, Lee co-organized, with Dr. Catherine M. Soussloff, the academic symposium “Foucault: Art, Histories, and Visuality in the 21st Century” at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU) in Toronto. The conference marked the 40th anniversary of the French thinker’s death and selected to be part of the World Congress “Foucault: 40 Years After.” Lee is currently working on his first book, preliminarily titled New Wave of American Photography: The Rise of Photographic Sequence in the United State and France, 1968–1989. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in various academic journals and art magazines, including Public, Compendium, Critical Inquiry, Materiali Foucaultiani, History of Photography, Canadian Art, and Afterimage. He is the author of “The Photogenic Invention of Thought-Emotion: Duane Michals and Michel Foucault,” in Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Lee was the Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona in 2016 and the Visiting Researcher at the Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2015.

Jason Lewis, Associate Member

Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media poet, artist, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he directs research/creation projects devising new means of creating and reading digital texts, developing systems for creative use of mobile technology and using virtual environments to assist Aboriginal communities in preserving, interpreting and communicating cultural histories. Along with the artist Skawennati, he co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Stortyelling and Video Game Design and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. His other interests include computation as a creative material, emergent media theory and history, and methodologies for conducting art-led technology research. Lewis' creative work has been featured at Ars Electronica, Mobilefest, Urban Screens, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and FILE, among other venues, and has been recognized with the inaugural Robert Coover Award for Best Work of Electronic Literature, a Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mention, several imagineNATIVE Best New Media awards and five solo exhibitions. He's the author or co-author of chapters in collected editions covering mobile media, video game design, machinima and experimental pedagogy with Indigenous communities, as well as numerous journal articles and conference papers.
Lewis has worked in a range of industrial research settings, including Interval Research, US West's Advanced Technology Group, and the Institute for Research on Learning, and, at the turn of the century, he founded and ran a research studio for the venture capital firm Arts Alliance. Lewis is a Trudeau Fellow, and a former Carnegie Fellow. He is the Concordia University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well as Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. Born and raised in California, he is Cherokee, Hawaiian and Samoan.

Robin Alex McDonald, External Member

Robin Alex McDonald is Assistant Professor, Department of Studio Arts at MacEwan University, located in Amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton, Alberta. Working at the intersections of contemporary art and critical theory, Robin’s research explores queer and trans contemporary visual art and cultural production, theories of emotion and relationality, and historical and contemporary discourses of “depression,” “madness,” and “mental health.” They are the co-editor of the 2021 anthology, Re/Imagining Depression: Creative Approaches to “Feeling Bad” (with Julie Hollenbach, NSCAD University), and have published in the journal of Literature and Medicine, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, TheatreForum, The Brooklyn Rail, n.paradoxa, esse, and Spiffy Moves. Robin is a member of the Prairie Art Network Advisory Board and a collaborator on the SSHRC-funded project, Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Canadian Art Histories (PI: Erin Silver, UBC). They hold an MA in Art History and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University in Katarokwi/Kingston, Ontario.

Karla McManus, External Member

Karla McManus is an art historian whose research focuses on how historic and contemporary concerns, from wildlife conservation, to environmental disasters, to anxiety about the future, are visualized photographically. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art (Art History) in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina. Karla’s current SSHRCC-funded research explores how bird photography, both as an art form and a documentary mode of image-making, has contributed to the historical and ongoing understanding of ecological knowledge and wildlife species conservation. Recent publications on the topic of ecology and the photographic image include the essays, “Narrating the Blind Field: Sites of Photographic and Ecological Knowledge in Rena Effendi’s Liquid Land” (2020) in Les Cahiers de ARIP, “The Future-Past, the Future-Present, the Future-Possible: The Chernobyl Exclusion Photographs of David McMillan,” in the edited collection Through Post-Atomic Eyes (2020), and “How Anthropo-scenic! Concerns and Debates about the Age of the Anthropocene” (2018) in the exhibition catalogue Anthropocene: Burtynsky, Baichwal, de Pencier. In 2019, Karla curated the exhibition Inside/Outside: Images of the LAND in Artexte’s Collection based on a research residency at Artexte Information Centre. Karla is an affiliate Member of the Documentary Media Research Centre, based in the School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, where she was an Assistant Professor (LTF) from 2017-2019. She is currently the Prairie Representative on the Board of the Universities Art Association of Canada (2019-2022).

Anik Meunier, External Member

Anik Meunier est professeure titulaire en muséologie et en éducation à l’UQAM où elle dirige le groupe de recherche sur l’éducation et les musées (GREM). Elle a réalisé une thèse de doctorat en éducation (UQAM) et Sciences de l’information et de la communication - muséologie (Avignon Université) qui lui a valu le Prix de la meilleure thèse québécoise réalisée en cotutelle du ministère de Relations internationales et du Consulat général de France à Québec. Elle s’intéresse au champ des médiations culturelles, c’est-à-dire à l’analyse des pratiques professionnelles des acteurs, aux méthodes qu’ils mobilisent et à leurs effets sur les différentes catégories de publics. Il s’agit notamment des médiations mises en œuvre dans le patrimoine et les musées connues sous le nom d’éducation muséale. Elle pilote de nombreux projets de recherche financés, entre autres, par les organismes subventionnaires de recherche canadiens et québécois et participe également à diverses activités en milieux éducatif et muséal notamment la conception et l’évaluation de programmes éducatifs muséaux auprès des enseignants et des élèves. L’expertise qu’elle a su développer au fil des ans se manifeste par une importante liste de communications et publications scientifiques. En 2021, la Faculté des sciences de l’éducation de l’UQAM lui a décerné le prix d’excellence en recherche, volet réalisations pour l’ensemble de sa contribution, à ce jour, au champ de l’éducation muséale.

Charmaine A. Nelson, External Member

Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History and the founding Director of the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, which supports research and research creation on the study of Canadian Slavery and slavery in the American North. She was previously a Professor of Art History, a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement, at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia (2020-2022). At NSCAD in 2020 she launched the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, the first-ever research centre focused on the overlooked 200-year history of Canadian participation in Transatlantic Slavery. As the director of the Institute, she has done considerable public outreach in the form of lectures, media interviews, blogs, and podcasts. She has also organized panels and oversaw the competition for the first cohort of five institute fellows (2021-2022). Prior to this appointment she worked at McGill University (Montreal) for seventeen years (2003-2020) and at Western University for two (2001-2003), where she became the first black person appointed as a tenured or tenure-track professor of Art History in Canada. Charmaine has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies. Much of her research examines the nature of power relations, resistance, and cultural production within the context of Transatlantic Slavery. She has also written about “high” art, “low” art, and popular culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Her seven books include The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), and Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2018). An incredibly active scholar, Charmaine has given over 300 lectures, papers, and talks across Canada, and the USA, and in Mexico, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, the UK, Central America, and the Caribbean. Her university lectures include Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, and Yale. She is also actively engaged with lay audiences through her media work including ABC, CBC, CTV, BBC One, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and PBS. She has blogged for the Huffington Post Canada and written for The Walrus. Charmaine is a consultant and on-camera expert for Hungry Eyes Media’s BLK: An Origin Story and the CBC’s Black Life: A Canadian History. She has also held several prestigious fellowships and appointments including a Caird Senior Research Fellowship, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK (2007) and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, University of California – Santa Barbara (2010). She was recently the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2017-2018) and a Fields of the Future Research Fellow at Bard Graduate Center in New York City (2021). She is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2022) and a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Gwendolyn Owens, External Member

Director of Curatorial Affairs, Visual Arts Collection, McGill University, is responsible for the University’s wide-ranging and expanding collection, which now includes more than 2500 works of art inside and outside buildings across three campuses. She has previously held curatorial positions at the university museums at Cornell University, Williams College, and the University of Maryland as well as the Canadian Centre for Architecture. An expert on university collections, collection management, and museum buildings, she has worked with many institutions, particularly universities, to help them organize their collections and follow professional standards. Her scholarly publications include articles, exhibition catalogues, and books on a wide range of topics including artist-architect Gordon Matta-Clark, on whom she has written extensively; mid-nineteenth century American landscape painting; painters Maurice Prendergast and David Milne; Montreal artist Melvin Charney; art markets in the 20^th century; and kitchen wallpaper in Canada. The book Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George, to which she contributed one of the three essays, received honorable mention from the Association of Art Museum Curators in 2014. In 2017, she co-curated the exhibition Higher States: Lawren Harris and his American Contemporaries for the McMichael Canadian Collection. She is currently researching the work of Marian Dale Scott. Owens holds degrees from Tufts University and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Edith-Anne Pageot, External Member

Edith-Anne Pageot est professeure au Département d’histoire de l’art de l’UQAM. Spécialiste des modernités au Québec et au Canada, elle s’intéresse à l’historiographie, aux rapports entre l’art et l’artisanat, aux modernismes et à leurs expressions artistiques plurielles, transculturelles et transnationales. Elle dirige actuellement le projet de recherche, La culture artistique au Collège Manitou. Agentivité et stratégies d’autodétermination, financé par les fonds, Nouvelles orientations de l’UQAM et le Conseil de recherche en sciences humaines du Canada (CRSH). Elle a publié des nombreux articles scientifiques et chapitres de livres, parmi lesquels mentionnons entre autres : « L'art autochtone à l'aune du discours critique dans les revues spécialisées en arts visuels au Canada. Les cas de Sakahàn et de Beat Nation », Muséologies, 9 (1), 2018: 81-95; « Présences, mémoires individuelles et plurielles comme dispositifs de construction dans le travail des créatrices autochtones », Espace, 118, 2018: 8-17; « Figure de l’indiscipline. Domingo Cisneros, un parcours artistique atypique », RACAR Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 42 (1), 2017: 5-21. Edith-Anne Pageot est membre de l'Institut de recherches et d'études féministes (IREF) et du Centre interuniversitaire d’études et de recherche autochtones (CIERA).

Carole Payne, External Member

Carol Payne is Professor of Art History and Associate Dean (Research and International) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University. Payne’s research centres on the history of photography and is mainly focused on interrogating the role photography plays in both supporting and disrupting settler colonialism in Canada. She coedited – with Dr. Andrea Kunard, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Canada—the collected volume, The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) and the monograph The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941-1971 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).  Since 2005, she has worked collaboratively on photo-based history projects with Inuit groups and knowledge keepers. Among other publications and community outputs, these collaborations have resulted in the collected volume Atiqput: Inuit Oral History and Project Naming (MQUP 2022), which she co-edited with Beth Greenhorn, Deborah Kigjugalik Webster, and Christina Williamson; the online exhibition Ajjiliurlagit: The Photographs of Joseph Idlout, co-edited with curator, educator and historian Augatnaaq Eccles; The Hunter, the Crown and the Cameras: Joseph Idlout (c.1911/15-68)  and the Image of Sangussaqtauliqtilluta (MQUP, forthcoming 2026) with contributions by Augatnaaq Eccles and members of the Idlout family; and a current collaboration with Inuit knowledge keepers Deborah Kigjugalik Webster and Bernadette Dean, and Michael Bravo at the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute. 

Sherry Farrell Racette, External Member

Sherry Farrell Racette is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art (Art History) in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina. Farrell Racette is an interdisciplinary scholar with an active arts practice. Recent essays have appeared in Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (2016), Rethinking Canada: the Promise of Women's History (2016), The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (2012), and Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism (2011). Her arts practice includes beadwork, painting and multi-media textile works. Curatorial and artistic projects include Resistance/ Resilience: Métis Art, 1860-2011 (Batoche Heritage Centre, Saskatchewan, 2011), We Are Not Birds (Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg, 2014) and From Here: Story Gatherings from the Qu’Appelle Valley (2015), a public installation of paintings based on memories of Métis elders. She has also illustrated children’s books by noted authors Maria Campbell, Freda Ahenakew and Ruby Slipperjack. Farrell Racette is the 2016-2017 Distinguished Indigenous Faculty Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute and Kierans-Janigan Visiting Scholar at Massey College.

Eduardo Ralickas, External Member

Dr. Eduardo Ralickas is an Associate Professor of Art History at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), where he teaches courses in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, art history, and methodology. He holds a joint PhD from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris) and the Université de Montréal. His current SSHRC-funded research engages critically with art history’s photographically mediated forms of knowing, showing, and telling. He is working on a book-length project provisionally entitled Voicing, Pictures: Photography, Epistemological Realism, and the Performance of Art-Historical Knowledge Narratives. Ralickas is the former English-language Assistant Editor of Parachute and is currently one of the editors of RACAR. He also sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien and the board of directors of Artexte. He is one of the founding members of the Formes actuelles de l’expérience photographique : épistémologies, pratiques, histoires research team lead by senior photography scholar Martha Langford (Concordia University). Ralickas has authored a number of essays that engage critically with the conditions of contemporary art, topics in the history of aesthetics, and the intersections of art and politics. He has also translated the work of Bruno Latour, Éric Michaud, and Daniel Vander Gucht, and edited texts by Amelia Jones, Caroline A. Jones, David Tomas, and Slavoj Žižek, among others.

Erin Silver, External Member

Erin Silver is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia and, from 2020-2025, was Chair of UBC’s Critical and Curatorial Studies MA Program. She is the author of Taking Place: Building Histories of Queer and Feminist Art in North America (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Suzy Lake: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute, 2021), as well as editor of the forthcoming volume Art and Feminisms: Histories, Methods, Legacies (Routledge, 2026) and co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2016). She has also co-edited special issues of Journal of Canadian Art History (2022) and C Magazine (2017) and is an incoming co-editor (with Martha Langford) of the McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History series. Silver has curated exhibitions at the FOFA Gallery (Concordia University, Montreal), the ArQuives (Toronto), and the Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto Scarborough). Her writing has appeared in C Magazine, CAA Reviews, Canadian Art, Ciel Variable, Prefix Photo, Fuse Magazine, Momus, Performance Matters, Sculpture Journal, Visual Resources, and in the volume Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (ed. Martha Langford, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), as well as in various exhibition catalogues in the areas of contemporary Canadian and queer and feminist art. Silver is the Principal Investigator of the 5-year (2023-2028) SSHRC Insight Grant project “Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Canadian Art Histories” and, with Melanie O’Brian, co-leads the Curatorial Research Excellence Cluster (UBC). In October 2025, Silver will become Editor-in-Chief of RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne, the affiliate journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada, having served as an editor of the journal from 2019-2025 and following the end of her term as President of UAAC (2022-2025).

Devon Smither, External Member

Devon Smither is Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Lethbridge, located in traditional Blackfoot Confederacy, Treaty 7, and Métis Nation 3 territory. She is an art historian whose research and teaching interests focus on gender and modernity, modern colonial-settler art in Canada, and modern North American women artists. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Toronto (2016), an MA in art history from the University of British Columbia (2010), and a BA with Distinction in Sociology from the University of Alberta (2003). Devon is currently completing a book manuscript based on her PhD research on the female nude in Canadian painting and photography from 1913 to 1965 (MQUP) as well as a manuscript on Pegi Nicol MacLeod (Art Canada Institute). Other current research projects explore Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s support of artists from 1905 to 1930 whose works form part of the founding collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (funded by a SSHRC IDG and Terra Grant) and a new project examining feminist art in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s. She is a founding member of Open Art Histories, a group of art historians in Canada devoted to advancing the conversation and scholarship on art, art history, and pedagogy. She has published articles and reviews in RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review, The Journal of Historical Sociology, and The Literary Review of Canada. Devon is the current English-language book editor for RACAR.

Susan Surette, Associate Member

Susan Surette is a ceramic artist and craft historian. She is a part-time faculty member in the Department of Art History of Concordia University where she earned her PhD in Art History, 2014, with a thesis on the eclectic and monumental ceramic mural installations in the Sturdy-Stone Centre, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her research interests centre on craft theory and practice, ceramic history, especially the history of mid-twentieth century ceramic tile murals, modern and contemporary textile history and practice, and the intersection of heritage with craft discourse and practices. She has co-edited Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts (Bloomsbury 2015), “The Special Edition on Craft: The Canadian Craft Biennial,” Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien 39:2/40:1 (2019), and Craft and Heritage: Intersections in Critical Studies and Practice (Bloomsbury 2021) and contributed essays to the Canadian Journal of Art History on Canadian ceramics. She is currently working on writing projects that address ceramic murals in modern architecture and Canadian textile art in architectural spaces, and is curating an exhibition for the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery on the Prairie ceramic muralist Lorraine Malach. Aside from presenting papers at conferences and chairing sessions, she has juried fibres and ceramics exhibitions and awards and consulted on national craft initiatives. She earned a BSc (WLU 1970), a BFA (Concordia 1997), and MA (Art History, Concordia 2003). Her initial introduction into the craft world was as a fibre artist, but over thirty years ago she embraced ceramics as a medium which has since captivated her. Her ceramic work is found in museum, public gallery and government collections and her current ceramic tile practice explores the intersection of landscapes, mapping, biology, and patterning.

Carla Taunton, External Member

Dr. Carla Taunton is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Art History and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Queen’s University as well as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Graduate Studies Department at Dalhousie University. Taunton is a co-investigator on The Kanata Indigenous Performance, New and Digital Media Art Project, a collaborative research partnership that traces Indigenous practices and methodologies in the areas of performance, digital and new media arts. She is also a co-organizer and collective members of the Art and Activism Project at NSCAD University and a member of the organizing committee for the Halifax-based “Indigenous Speakers Series.” She has received numerous internal SSHRC research grants at NSCAD (2012, 2013, 2014) for her current projects including Arts East: The Atlantic Arts Network and Art and Activism. In 2012, her PhD thesis received the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Taunton’s areas of expertise include Indigenous arts and methodologies, contemporary Canadian art, museum and curatorial studies, as well as theories of decolonization, anti-colonialism and settler responsibility. Through this work she investigates current approaches towards the writing of Indigenous-specific art histories, recent Indigenous and settler research/arts collaborations, and strategies of creative-based interventions that challenge colonial narratives, national/ist institutions and settler imagination. Her recent publications include, “Ursula Johnson: Embodying Indigenous Art Histories” in Ursula Johnson: Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember), “Addressing the Settler Problem,” in fuse and “Indigenous (Re)memory and Resistance: Video works by Dana Claxton,” in Talking Back, Moving Forward: Conversations on Native Film. Her current projects include, Theories and Methodologies for Indigenous Arts, co-edited book project with Dr. Heather Igloliorte and “This is What I Wish You Knew”: Urban Aboriginal Artists Tell Their Stories of Identity and Reconciliation, a multi-institution community arts based project that will engage urban Indigenous youth in Halifax (Reconciliation Community Arts Project: Canada Council for the Arts Grant). She is also an independent curator and recently co-curated with Erin Sutherland, Memory Keepers: Methodologies of Memory, Mapping and Gender at Urban Shaman Gallery in conjunction with the 30^th Anniversary of MAWA (2014) and Art in the Open – Indigenizing pei with Heather Igloliorte in Charlottetown (2014). Taunton will provide her working knowledge of artists in Nova Scotia and Ontario as well as her curatorial expertise.

Janis Timm-Bottos, Associate Member

Associate Professor Janis Timm-Bottos is a board certified art therapist and an interdisciplinary scholar with a sustained research practice investigating the community art studio as a therapeutic site for individual, family and community healing. She is founder of ArtStreet, an art studio with Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless,  OFFCenter Community Arts Project, an arts-based public homeplace in downtown Albuquerque and "Kitchen Table Arts," which was housed in a thrift store in Nelson, BC and spawned "Children of the Seams" a youth collective that remakes fashion from discarded clothing. A presenter in both local and international venues, Janis advocates for the return of small, welcoming, free community art spaces located between neighbourhoods. Her current research and training site includes a storefront classroom in St. Henri, "La Ruche d'Art: Community Studio and Science Shop."  La Ruche or the art hive is open two days a week for the community to join together to make art. She and her students have launched a national network of art hives across Canada. Please see www.arthives.org. Janis is currently serving as the Provost's Fellow for Community Engagement and is committed to helping lead the university's new strategy: Embrace the City. One outcome of this initiative is to support Concordia's partnership with the Montreal Museum of Fine Art through facilitating a new downtown art hive at the museum.

Zoë Tousignant, External Member

Zoë Tousignant is a photography historian and curator specializing in Canadian photography. She works as an assistant curator in the McCord Museum’s photography collection and as a curator at the documentation centre Artexte. She holds a PhD in Art History from Concordia University and an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leeds. Her doctoral thesis investigates the dissemination of photographic modernism in popular illustrated magazines published in Canada between 1925 and 1945. She is currently working on a book manuscript, based on the research carried out for her thesis, that seeks to draw out the connections between art, photography and print culture in Quebec during the Interwar period. Her recent curatorial projects include Gabor Szilasi: The Art World in Montreal, 1960–1980 (McCord Museum, 2017–2018); Canadian Photography Magazines, 1970–1990: Reconsidering a History of Photography in Print (Artexte, 2016); Marisa Portolese: Belle de Jour III – Dialogues with Notman’s Portrait of Women (FOFA Gallery, 2016); and Campeau, Carrière, Clément: Accumulations (Galerie Simon Blais, 2015). She has been a regular contributor to the magazine Ciel variable since 2008. Her essays have also been published in Canadian Art, Archivaria and Revue de Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and in several catalogues and monographic books. She was the assistant editor on the book Notman: A Visionary Photographer (Hazan and McCord Museum, 2016), which received the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research – Cultural Heritage from the Canadian Museums Association. Tousignant is a member of the FQRSC-funded research group Formes actuelles de l’expérience photographique: épistémologies, pratiques, histoires, based at Concordia University, Université de Montréal, Université Laval and UQAM.

Kathleen Vaughan, Associate Member

As an artist, scholar and educator, Kathleen Vaughan’s interdisciplinary practice integrates research-creation, methodological theorizing, and collaborative and community-based practices. Her research-creation has both an individual studio component and an orientation to collaborative, participatory projects, taking up questions of home, belonging and spirit of place. She is particularly compelled by the traces of histories that endure in places and the ways that human stories are built in place. Those places can be the urban streets of Toronto or Montreal (the two cities between which she has moved) or the more natural settings of waterways, woodlands and peat bogs. All – and the histories, dreams and myths that are sited there – have inspired her artwork. She works in drawing, painting, photography, textiles and text, often in collaged conjunctions. Her practice integrates analogue and digital technologies, and she is a research member of the Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technologies. Intrigued by the application of fine arts methods to scholarship, Dr. Vaughan is elaborating collage as a framework for interdisciplinary research/creation/pedagogy. Her methodological theorizing often draws from and supports her own creative projects. As an artist in the community, Kathleen Vaughan mobilizes people in social service agencies, community sites, museums and galleries, after-school programs and more, in creating socially and personally relevant artwork. Research projects such as Vu d’ici: Artmaking and Storytelling with Seniors in Pointe-St-Charles have engaged residents of social housing, taking up questions of home and belonging. For her 2012 bilingual artist’s project, Dans le village…/In the village…, she partnered with curator Shauna Janssen and the Centre d’histoire de Montréal (with financial support from the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, cohds), creating an interactive artist’s workbook and community walk through the Montreal community of Goose Village, expropriated and demolished in anticipation of Expo 67. Dr. Vaughan often integrates oral history methods and content into her community-based research; she is a core member of COHDS. Kathleen Vaughan also locates her teaching within Montreal’s fertile community settings, with Graduate Studio classes (2013, 2014, 2015) being linked to place. For 2015-2016, Dr. Vaughan will join colleagues Dr. Cynthia Hammond (Art History), Dr. Steven High (History) and Dr. Edward Little (Theatre) in “The Right to the City,” a cross-disciplinary, community-engaged exploration of Pointe-St-Charles, one of Montreal’s most economically marginal neighbourhoods now contending with gentrification and increasing income inequality. Kathleen Vaughan holds a PhD in Education from York University (Toronto), where her multimodal PhD dissertation incorporating a visual art installation and illustrated text was the first of its kind at the university, and won four Canadian and international academic awards for innovation and excellence. Dr. Vaughan has also earned an mfa in Studio Arts from Concordia University (Montreal), a diploma in Fine Arts from the (then) Ontario College of Art (Toronto) and a ba in English and Art History from the University of Toronto. Prior to joining the Art Education faculty at Concordia in 2008, she taught in York University’s Faculty of Education, at the Ontario College of Art and Design, in Concordia’s Studio Arts department and through visiting artist programs in Toronto schools. Dr. Vaughan also works as a consultant on issues of arts, education, culture, and broadcasting for clients in the public and private sectors.

Jean-Philippe Warren, Associate Member

Dr. Jean-Philippe Warren is a Professor of Sociology at Concordia University and he holds degrees from the Université Laval, the Université de Montréal and the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. He is particularly interested in the history of social sciences, social movements, indigenous peoples, and the Catholic Church. He has written studies on Quebec sociologist Fernand Dumont, painter Paul-Émile Borduas, and Honoré Beaugrand. He has published widely on the intellectual and cultural history in Quebec - including Edmond de Nevers, portrait d'un intellectuel (Boréal, 2005); Hourra pour Santa Claus. La commercialisation de la saison des fêtes au Québec (Boréal, 2006); Ils voulaient changer le monde. Le militantisme marxiste-léniniste au Québec (VLB, 2007); Une Douce anarchie. Les années 68 au Québec (Boréal, 2008). He is also the author of over a hundred articles in scholarly and intellectual journals. This work led him to question the social and political institutionalization of modernity in Quebec.