Leah Decter
Individual
Roles
Artist, Author, Curator, WriterBiography
Leah Decter is an inter-media artist and scholar based between Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, and K'jipuktuk/Halifax where she holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Creative Technologies at NSCAD University. Working from a critical white settler perspective her artistic practice and research address social-spatial dynamics in settler colonial contexts through decolonizing practices and an ethic of being-in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty.She has exhibited, presented, and screened her artwork widely in Canada, including at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, McKenzie Art Gallery, Plug In ICA, Dunlop Art Gallery, Kamloops Art Gallery, Images Festival, and Gimli Film Festival, as well as internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Malta, Netherlands, India, and Australia. She has undertaken social practice projects and performances across the country and her curatorial work includes Mammo’iiang to Make Change (with Jaimie Isaac), after this (with Carla Taunton) and the ongoing project, oh-oh Canada. Decter’s artwork has appeared in publications including Fuse Magazine, Studio: Craft and Design in Canada, Journal of Canadian Art History, and Border Crossings and is represented in collections including, most recently, Global Affairs Canada.
Her most recent writing has been published in Qualitative Inquiry Journal, Performance Matters Journal, and C Magazine (with Tania Willard), as well as books including Unsettling Canadian Art History and Theories and Methodologies for Indigenous Arts in North America (with Carla Taunton). The Special Issue of PUBLIC Journal she co-edited with Carla Taunton “Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures” was published in 2022.
Decter holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queens University and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute. In 2017, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales’ in Sydney, Australia. From 2019-2020 she was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University's Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology.
Leah Decter, 2024