Biography

Amanda Dawn Christie is an interdisciplinary artist working in film, video, performance, electronics, photography, transmission art, and electroacoustic sound design. She has exhibited and performed in art galleries across Canada, and her films have screened internationally from Cannes to Korea to San Fransisco and beyond. She was the 2014 Atlantic finalist for the National Media Art prize, and had a 10 year retrospective exhibition of her work curated by Mireille Bourgeois, at the Galerie d’art Louise et Reuben Cohen, and was also included in the Marion McCain Biennale of Atlantic Contemporary Art, curated by Corinna Ghaznavi. Since 1997, she has been actively involved with artist run centres, in both volunteer and staff positions: serving on various boards, working as both a technician and later as a director, teaching workshops, publishing articles, and serving on juries across Canada. She completed her MFA at the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, before moving to Amsterdam. Upon her return to Canada she worked at the Faucet Media Arts Centre & Struts Gallery in Sackville, NB, while teaching part time at Mount Allison University. She later worked as the director of the Galerie Sans Nom and the RE:FLUX festival of music, while teaching part time at l'Université de Moncton. She left her position directing the GSN in 2014 to dedicate her time to an interactive performance project called Requiem for Radio, which premiered in spring of 2017 with the support of a new media creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. 

She is currently working on a new media transmission art project called Ghosts in the Air Glow with the support of a Canada Council grant, which involves mixing audio and images in the D layer of the earth's ionosphere using the Ionospheric Research Instrument, an array of 180 radio antennas, at the HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) facility in Alaska.

Concepts and themes explored in her work focus primarily on the relationship between the human body and analogue technology in a digital age.  She spent the last several years working on various projects related to shortwave radio and the RCI (Radio Canada International) shortwave transmission site.   One major body of work related to the RCI towers is called Spectres of Shortwave, and it includes a 2 hour experimental documentary film as well as  various accompanying gallery installations. The other major body of work about the RCI shortwave site is called Requiem for Radio, and it includes a one hour interdiscplinary performance with various accompanying installations and performances in five parts.  Both Spectres of Shortwave and Requiem for Radio were created with the support of Arts NB and the Canada Council for the Arts. Ghosts in the Air Glow is currently in progress and involves creating audio and image works relating to military and civilian scientific research, surveillance, climate, territory, and communications embedded into radio frequencies transmitted straight into and through the ionosphere to the liminal boundaries of outer space.

View Amanda Christie's CV