Meet our new tenure-track faculty

Six new faculty members are joining the Faculty of Fine Arts in 2020, with three more hires to start in 2021

August 11, 2020

By Andy Murdoch

We are thrilled to announce that six new tenure-track faculty will start work in the Faculty of Fine Arts this year – with another three joining us in 2021. Six of them started work on August 1. Take a moment to meet our newest faculty members!

Hannah Claus, Assistant Professor, Studio Arts

Photo by Danya Danger

Hannah Claus' tenure-track position in Frameworks and Interventions in Indigenous Art Practice in the Department of Studio Arts is non-program specific, but this year you will find her in ARTX and Fibres and Material Practices. Claus is a transdisciplinary artist of Kanien’kehá:ka / English heritage whose practice-based research engages with the idea of space shaped by language, material culture and place as transversal living concepts. She employs Onkwehonwenéha [Indigenous methodology] to critique dominant colonial narratives and give voice to Indigenous histories, teachings and cosmologies. A 2019 Eiteljorg Fellow and 2020 Prix Giverny recipient, recent group exhibitions include Inaabiwin (touring exhibition with the Robert McLaughlin Gallery; Oshawa), Future Retrospectives (Harbourfront Gallery; Toronto) and Àbadakone (National Gallery of Canada; Ottawa). Claus’ installations belong to various public collections, such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Eiteljorg Museum, the North American Native Museum (Zurich, CH), the Musée des beaux arts de Montréal, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the City of Montreal. Claus is a member of the Board of Directors of the Conseil des arts de Montréal and a co-founder of daphne, a new Indigenous contemporary arts centre based in Tiohtià:ke [Montreal].

Visit Hannah Claus' faculty profile.

Deanna Bowen, assistant professor, Studio Arts

Deanna Bowen's tenure-track position in Intersectional, Feminist and/or Decolonial 2D and 4D Image-Making Practices is not program-specific, but this year she may be found teaching in Intermedia and Photography. Bowen writes:

"I am a descendant of the Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneers of Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. My family history has been the central pivot of my auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary practice since the early 1990s. I am a recipient of a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts Award, a 2018 Canada Council Research and Creation Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant in 2017, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. My writing, interviews and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. I am the editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.

"My educational focus is an extension of my interdisciplinary art practice, which is grounded in Black Feminist thought and related concerns about decolonization, revisionist art practices and institutional critique. These considerations inform my deep belief that the stories and histories of ‘everyday’ people are vitally important tools that have the potential to foster meaningful change locally and globally. I teach material that questions assumptions and de-centres settler colonialist art narratives which then prompts students to consider the manufacture and representation of power and difference. Viewed more broadly, these pedagogical efforts are meant to motivate students to craft artworks with a deepened understanding of their subjective position, their relationship to a given medium, their rationale for its political/personal use, and their conscious engagement in public platforms/arenas. I champion experimentation and equally relish a well-made thing.

"I teach a variety of courses in traditional studio and time-based mediums and have developed curriculum that provides comprehensive overviews of contemporary art history, image/object/performance-based studio practices, photography, video art production and web-based art. I am interested in the conceptual application of old and new technologies for artistic use. My interests in digital and analog moving image culture and other hybrid studio practices reflect my ongoing preoccupation with history and historical writing and the ways in which artistic and technological advancements impact individual and collective authorship. As such, my courses tend to balance technical, conceptual and theoretical concerns, and my teaching goals reflect my aspirations to foster artistic and technological literacy in their broadest senses."

Visit Deanna Bowen's faculty profile.

Juan Oritz Apuy, Assistant Professor, Studio Arts

Juan Ortiz-Apuy's tenure-track position in Critical Perspectives on Inclusion in 3D Art Practices is not program-specific, but he is teaching in the Sculpture program this year. Ortiz-Apuy is a Canadian-Costa Rican artist who has been living and working in Montreal since 2003. Ortiz-Apuy has a BFA from Concordia University (2008), a Post-Graduate Diploma from The Glasgow School of Art (2009), and an MFA from NSCAD University (2011). His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally. Ortiz-Apuy's research focuses on materiality and commodity fetishism as viewed through the lenses of postcolonialism and environmental exploitation. In his teaching practice, he is interested in decolonizing the classroom and fostering radical pedagogy.

Visit Juan Ortiz Apuy's facilty profile.

Michelle McGeough, Assistant Professor, Art History

Originally from Amiskwaciwâskahikan, Michelle McGeough is a Métis scholar and artist. Prior to accepting her current position as an Assistant Professor at Concordia University, she taught at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McGeough received her PhD in Indigenous art histories from the University of New Mexico. Her research interests have focused on the indigenous two-spirit identity. Presently she is working on a manuscript that examines Indigenous understandings of gender fluidity and the impact these notions have on artistic production. Other areas of her research include the application of Indigenous research methodologies and the incorporation of these ways of knowing into the development of curriculum and the curation of contemporary and historic Indigenous art.

Dr. McGeough also has a B.F.A. from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, A.F.A. from Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico and B.Ed. from the University of Alberta.

Visit Michelle McGeough's faculty profile.

Jessica Bleuer, Lecturer, Creative Arts Therapies

How can drama therapy support equity and social justice in education, clinical work and beyond?

Jessica Bleuer's (she/her pronouns) research in the field of Drama Therapy focuses on health equity, the social determinants of health, and the negative impacts of racism and xenophobia on people's sense of belonging, safety and general well being. Her research projects prioritize the resilience and knowledge of targeted groups, and current research focuses on using a Nervous-System Informed Theatre of the Oppressed to support educators to address racial and ethnic microaggressions in university and cegep classrooms.

Jessica was the two-term Diversity Chair for her professional association, the North American Drama Therapy Association, and has won equity and inclusion awards such as the YMCA Volunteer Peace Medal in 2016 and the North American Drama Therapy Association Raymond Jacobs Diversity Award in 2018.

Visit Jessica Bleuer's faculty profile.

Cynthia Bruce, Assistant Professor, Creative Arts Therapies

Cynthia Bruce, Assistant Professor, Music Therapy

Dr. Cynthia Bruce is a blind activist educator, music therapist and researcher whose work aims to bring Critical Disability Studies and disability rights to the centre of social justice work in Music Therapy. Her teaching and research prioritize the under-represented voices of disabled scholars, clinicians, students, and participants in music therapy research, practice, and training/education. She similarly centres the lived experience of disability as a site of critical inquiry – one that can help us understand the presence of ableist normativity in the cultivation of relationships with music. Disability Studies has much to offer current efforts to analyze and expose, in the context of equity and social justice initiatives, how normative ideals have restricted entry into therapeutic professions through deficit-oriented constructions of competence. Dr. Bruce hopes to expand understandings of disability as valued diversity through analysis and theorizing of the presence of ableism and dis/ableism in the everyday practices and priorities of music therapy in Canada and abroad.

Visit Cynthia Bruce's faculty profile.

Ishita Tiwary, Assistant Professor, Film Studies

(Starts January 2021)

Starting in January, Ishita Tiwary is Horizon Post Doctoral Fellow at the Mel Hoppenheim school of Cinema, Concordia University. Her research interests include video cultures, media infrastructures, contraband media practices and media aesthetics in South Asia. She is currently working on a book manuscript on analog video cultures in India. Her new research projects tracks the migration of media objects and people from China to India via the Nepal and Tibet border. Her work has been published in journals such as Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities, Marg: Journal of Indian Art amongst others.

Preview: starting summer 2021

The tenure-track hiring process for the position of Frameworks and Interventions in Indigenous Art Practice/Studio Arts, has resulted in the appointment, effective August 1, 2021, of Mark Igloliorte, Associate Professor, Studio Arts.

Mark Igloliorte is an Inuk artist born in Corner Brook, Newfoundland with Inuit ancestry from Nunatsiavit, Labrador. His artistic work is primarily painting and drawing. Igloliorte’s work has been featured in several notable national exhibitions including the 2015 Marion McCain Exhibition of Contemporary Atlantic Canadian Art, curated by Corinna Ghaznavi; Inuit Ullumi: Inuit Today: Contemporary Art from TD Bank Group’s Inuit Collection; Beat Nation, curated by Kathleen Ritter and Tania Willard; and The Phoenix Art-The Renewed Life of Contemporary Painting, curated by Robert Enright. In addition, Igloliorte has been profiled in features in Canadian Art magazine and Inuit Art Quarterly. Igloliorte is an Assistant Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. 

The tenure-track hiring process for the position of Intersectional, Feminist and/or Decolonial 2D and 4D Image-Making Practices /Studio Arts has resulted in the appointment, effective August 1, 2021, of Jaret Vadera, Assistant Professor, Studio Arts. 

Jaret Vadera explores how different technologies shape and control the ways that we see the world around and within us. For the past 20 years, Vadera has been using collage, photography, video, sculpture, and installation as a means to examine the ways that power, technology, and ideology intersect in images. Working across media, Vadera reconfigures and reimagines representational modes that commonly serve as proof, document or evidence. Photographs, maps, infographics, and x-rays are hacked and redeployed to decolonize ways of seeing embedded within Enlightenment rationalism, and to open up other spaces. Vadera's practice is influenced by cognitive science, post/de-colonial theory, science fiction, Buddhist philosophy, and the study of impossible objects. Vadera's work has been exhibited and screened at the: Queens Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Asia Society Museum, and Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in New York; Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai; Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah; and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. In parallel, Vadera has worked as a curator, programmer, and writer on projects that focus on art as a catalyst for social change. Vadera completed his undergraduate education at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto and the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. He received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Jaret Vadera lives and works between Canada, the US, and India. Vadera is currently based in New York.

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