Dr. Carla Taunton

Editorial Board Member

NSCAD UNIVERSITY
 

Dr. Carla Taunton an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the department of Cultural Studies at Queen’s. She holds a PhD in Art History from Queen’s University and a MA in Canadian Art History from Carleton University. In 2012, her PhD dissertation on histories of Indigenous performance art 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 collaborative research projects include: Transactive Memory Keepers (2016-ongoing); The Kanata Indigenous Performance, New and Digital Media Art Project (2013-16); Arts East (2014-5); This is What I Wish You Knew: Urban Aboriginal Artists (2015-ongoing) and Theories and Methodologies for Indigenous Arts in North America (2014-ongoing). 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 30th Anniversary of MAWA (2014), Art in the Open – Indigenizing PEI with Heather Igloliorte in Charlottetown (2014) and co-curated two projects for Inuit Blanche (2016): Couzyn van Heuvelen’s Avataq and Tanya Lukin Linklater’s Slay All Day. Her recent publications include “Performing Sovereignty: Forces to be Reckoned With” in More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (2016) and “Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada,” in Narratives Unfolding (2017). With Dr. Julie Nagam and Dr. Heather Igloliorte, Taunton co-edited PUBLIC 54: Indigenous Art, the first special issue on global Indigenous new media and digital arts.