Deanna Bowen

Bio:

Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. She is a recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, a 2020 Governor’s General Award, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and artworks have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada. Her 2020 self-titled Scotiabank Photography Prize book is printed and distributed by Stiedl Verlag. Deanna lives and works in Montreal, QC, where she is an Associate Professor of Intersectional Feminist and Decolonial 2D-4D Image Making at Concordia University. Bowen graduated with a Master's Degree in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto in 2008.