Research Collaborators
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Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD). Her research contributes to arts-based critiques of settler colonialism and engages with theories of decolonization and inter-generational settler responsibility. She recently co-edited PUBLIC 64Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies Towards Decolonized Futures and The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art in the United States and Canada. As a core research team member on several SSHRC grants, such as Inuit Futures, Thinking through the Museum and Counter Memory Activism she leads curatorial, publication and research creation projects as well as co-organizes public lecture series, workshops, and symposia. Her current research project, Curating Change explores curatorial activisms in settler colonial contexts and mobilizes collaborative curatorial incubators as a methodology towards activating inter-cultural, decolonial and anti-racist social change.
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Dr. Michelle McGeough (Cree Métis/Settler) completed her PhD in Indigenous art history at the University of New Mexico. Prior to returning to school for her advanced degree, she taught Museum Studies at the Institute of American Indian Art and was the Assistant curator at the Wheelwright Museum of the Native American Indian in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dr. McGeough has a Master’s degree from Carleton University as well as a BFA from Emily Carr and an undergraduate degree from the Institute of American Indian Art. She also has a B.Ed. degree from the University of Alberta. Dr. McGeough currently teaches at Concordia University in the Art History department.
Dr. McGeough’s research interests have focused on the indigenous two-spirit identity. She is a board member of daphne, the first Indigenous artist run centre in Tiohtià:ke and the IF collective. Dr. McGeough is a co-applicant in the SSCHR Thinking Through the Museum Partnership grant, Queer Operatives, and The Morrisseau Project, and Curating Change. Her essays have appeared in C-space, Union Docs, and an upcoming volume entitled Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer, and LGBTTQ* Interventions into Museums, Archives, and Curation.
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Photo credit: Bell-Gam Obiesha
Jaimie Isaac is a curator and interdisciplinary artist, Anishinaabe member of Sagkeeng First Nation and is of British heritage. As the Curatorial Researcher with the University of Manitoba Center for Human Rights Research, she is researching with the Just Waters project in 2025/27. She was the Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from 2021-2023 and advisor 2023-2024. As the Curator of Contemporary and Indigenous Arts at the Winnipeg Art Gallery 2015-2021, she was awarded the Canadian Museums Association outstanding achievement award in the exhibitions category with the Boarder X exhibition. Isaac received the Winnipeg Art Council’s Mayor Award for Community Impact in 2025 and University of Winnipeg's Distinguished Alumni Award for Community Impact, 2025. She is co-director/co-founder of ROSEMARY Gallery/SKOOL, a roving project space. Interests in reconciliation, resistance, resilience, decolonization in art and in sport, Indigenous feminism, environmental justice, language and cultural resurgence.
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Dawn Biddison works in equitable collaboration with Alaska Native Elders, Knowledge-Holders, artists, educators, learners, and cultural organization staff on Indigenous heritage projects. Her work began with community-based museum research, exhibition, and website work, and continues through museum outreach, collections access, research, fieldwork, artist residencies, workshops, public programs, and shared interdisciplinary documentation and resources that respect Indigenous protocols and goals, support intergenerational learning and teaching, and facilitate accessibility. Dawn has worked at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Alaska since 2003. Examples of her work with communities are available online at the Smithsonian Learning Lab website "Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Alaska" https://learninglab.si.edu/org/sasc-ak.
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Ryan Rice, Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawake, is a Toronto-based curator, critic, and creative consultant. With a curatorial career spanning over 35 years, he has worked across communities, museums, artist-run centres, public spaces, and galleries. Rice currently serves as Executive Director and Curator, Indigenous Art at OCAD University’s Onsite Gallery. He is the 2025 recipient of the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Margo Bindhardt and Rita Davies Cultural Leadership Award and is a member of the Curatorial Advisory for Toronto’s 2026 Nuit Blanche. His most recent curatorial project is Skennen'kó:wa ken? (Do You Carry Great Peace?) for the Canadian Pavilion at the 16th edition of the Gwangju Biennale, and the retrospect exhibition Rosalie Favell | Belonging (1982–2024), which is touring across Canada through to 2028.
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Dr. Kirsty Robertson is Canada Research Chair in Museums, Art, and Sustainability, in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University. She also directs the Centre for Sustainable Curating (CSC), which supports research on waste, pollution, and the climate crisis, and the development of low-waste, low-carbon exhibitions and artworks. Robertson has published extensively in critical museum studies, including in her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums, Culture (MQUP, 2019), and in her forthcoming work Countering the Museum: Activism at the Limits of the Institution (Museums in Focus Series, Routledge). Robertson has curated exhibitions in Paris, Toronto, Ottawa, New York, and London (ON), and has presented her work in venues around the world. She is a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, an art-STEM collaboration addressing plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region, co-lead with Dr. Eugenia Kisin on A Museum for Future Fossils, an ongoing project that responds curatorially to ecological crisis, and co-director with Dr. Heather Igloliorte of As It Melts: Indigenous Artistic Responses to Plastics Pollution.
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Photo credit: Billie Jean Gabriel
Tania Willard is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. Her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities. Her artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014. Willard’s work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2025 Willard won one of the top Canadian contemporary art awards, the Sobey Art Award.