Amber Berson receives 2024 SSHRC Insight grant

An Affiliate of our department, Amber Berson, received the 2024 Insight grant awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. As co-applicant, Amber plans to examine and document the history and impact of artist-run centres, which were created in the 1960s and 1970s as alternatives to commercial galleries.

The six-year project is titled Parallel: The History and Archives of Artist-Run Centres in Canada. 

Amber is currently the  Executive Director of The Visual Arts Centre in Montreal. Amber Berson is a writer, a curator, and an Art Historian. She holds a doctoral degree from Queen’s University where her SSHRC-funded research examined artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. In her spare time, Berson works on knowledge equity projects, especially with the Art+Feminism Wikipedia project, where she worked in various capacities for a decade and now sits on the Board. Furthermore, she was the 2019-2020 Wikipedian-in-Residence at Concordia University Libraries. In addition to her curatorial work, Berson’s writing has been published in a variety of publications, including Canadian Art, C Magazine, Revue .dpi, Esse, Fuse Magazine, M/Other Voices, Vie des arts, The Creative Independent and the St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies.