Advisory: As Halifax Water is currently undertaking work at the Fountain campus, we ask our community to not drink the water at the Fountain campus. We will update you as soon as the work has been completed.

BIO

Faculty

Dr. Leah Decter

Associate Professor
Division of Media Arts
Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies and Community Engagement

CONTACT INFORMATION

Email: ldecter@nscad.ca

Background

Dr. Leah Decter is an inter-media/performance artist and scholar based in Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty 1 Territory. Working from a critical white settler perspective, her research, writing and artwork/research-creation contend with the ways artistic production can subvert colonial ideations embedded in the settler imaginary and contribute to decolonial and non-colonial paradigms. Decter holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queens University and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute. In 2019-20 she was an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design/Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, and in 2017 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales’ National Institute for Experimental Arts. Decter has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada including at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Dunlop Art Gallery, McKenzie Art Gallery, Plug In ICA, Images Festival, the Institute of Performance and Politics’ Hemispheric Enquentro and Trinity Square Video, and internationally including in the US, UK, Germany, Malta, Netherlands, India and Australia. Her artwork has been featured in The Journal of Canadian Art History, Craft and Design in Canada, Journal of Canadian Heritage, Fuse Magazine and Border Crossing, and her writing has been published in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies and Canadian Theatre Review. Her co-authored writing (with Carla Taunton, Ayumi Goto and Jaimie Isaac, respectively) has been published in Fuse Magazine’s Decolonizing Aesthetics Issue, The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation and West Coast Line’s Reconcile This! Issue. Decter’s upcoming publications include a co-edited Special Issue of PUBLIC Journal and several book chapters. Her current research-creation/art projects address social-spatial politics consequent to settler colonial formation and consider the ethics of being-in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty.