Deanna Bowen is a Black Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose auto-ethnographic practice examines race, migration, historical writing and authorship.

Bowen will discuss her current work, which revisits a play staged by Canada’s artistic elite at Hart House in 1922. It projected the horrors of war onto a version of Romeo and Juliet — using native’ motifs and “red face.” Her film enacts dialogue with Indigenous writers and artists about the play. She will also briefly discuss her new book Other Places: Reflections of Media Arts in Canada.

“My talk will take up issues of redface/blackface/brownface, nation building, and the 1921 potlatch ban in Alert Bay” and will invite people to “engage more intentionally with Canada’s racist colonial history.”