BIO

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). She is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the department of Cultural Studies at Queen’s and in the department of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University, and also serves on graduate committees at Carleton University and University of British Columbia Okanagan. Dr. Taunton holds a MA in Canadian Art History from Carleton University (2006) and a PhD in Art History from Queen’s University (2011). Her PhD research titled, Performing Resistance/Negotiating Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada won the Governor Generals Gold Medal in 2012. Dr. Taunton’s research focuses on arts-led interrogations of settler colonialism systems, institutions, and logics. Her research contributes to scholarly and curatorial activations of arts-based critiques of settler colonialism, Indigenous arts and methodologies, contemporary Canadian art and activism(s), museum and curatorial studies, as well as theories of decolonization, inter-cultural collaboration, anti-colonialism and settler responsibility. She has many national collaborative research partnerships including SSHRC Talent Partnership Grant, The Pilimmaksarniq/ Pijariuqsarniq Project: Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership led by Dr. Heather Igloliorte (2018), SSHRC Partnership Grant, Thinking Through the Museum led by Dr. Erica Lehrer and SSHRC Insight Grant Memory Activism: Collaborative Processes of Counter-Memorialization led by Sol Nagler (2020).  She is currently leading a new research project Curating Change (SSHRC Insight Grant 2023) that underscores curatorial practice as research and aims to mobilize inter-cultural decolonial and transformative curatorial methodologies.  In 2020 she was awarded the Best Peer-Reviewed Article Award by the Canadian Studies Network for her co-authored essay with Dr. Sarah E.K. Smith in the Journal of Canadian Studies “Unsettling Canadian Heritage: Decolonial Aesthetics in Canadian Video and Performance Art.”   Working with Dr. Leah Decter they have published several collaborative publications on decolonial and critical white settler methodologies for the cultural sector, such as a chapter in Unsettling Canadian Art History and co-editing PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies towards Decolonizing Futures. Her recent publications include the co-edited Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories of the United States and Canada (2023). She works as an independent curator and was a curatorial team member for the 2019 Abadakone: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada.  Curating projects at local and national artist run centres, university and regional art galleries as well as public art festivals such as Nocturne and Art in the Open, she aims to activate decolonizing collaborative practices in public space and within the broader arts and culture sector.