Directors
Jakub Zdebik, Chair
Jakub Zdebik received his PhD from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at The University of Western Ontario specializing in Contemporary French Aesthetic Theory. After he obtained his PhD, he became Visiting Research Fellow at The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University. His monograph, entitled Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization, was published by Continuum Press and is based on his doctoral dissertation. This book explores the notion of organizational aesthetics and its representation through the concept of the diagram as it can be observed in modern and contemporary art. He has translated French texts by Guattari and Jean-Clet Martin. He curated an exhibition for the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio entitled Art as Information. He is also working on a monograph on the concept of the map-image.
Andrea D. Fitzpatrick, Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies in Art History
Andrea D. Fitzpatrick (they/them; she/her) earned a Ph.D. in art history and critical theory from McGill University in 2005 and has been an Associate Professor of Art History since 2012. Their research focuses on contemporary visual art in all media (especially photography, video, performance, multi-media, and installation), identity, gender, critical race theory, anti-colonial theories, the politics and ethics of representation, as well as images of and resistance to human rights violations during particular wars and conflicts. Currently, they’re exploring contemporary art by diasporic Iranian women in Canada; the life’s work of Iranian-Canadian artist Sadegh Tirafkan; contemporary South African art and exhibitions; Palestinian photographic art and resistance; curatorial support for Global South artists in Documenta exhibitions (#11 - 15) in Kassel, and at the Venice Biennale (#56, 2015); and Holocaust memorials in Berlin. Fitzpatrick has also: presented their research internationally; had their research translated into German, Farsi, and French; and curated exhibitions of Iranian lens-based art at two artist-run centers in Canada (SAW Gallery in Ottawa, and Gallery 44 in Toronto). They are currently working on a book about contemporary art, methodologies, exhibitions, and memorials, and the usefulness of various theoretical and philosophical paradigms to address those areas.
Lorraine Gilbert, Director of the Master of Fine Arts program
Lorraine Gilbert has been producing and exhibiting photographic works since 1978. These works have been featured in solo, group and two-person exhibitions such as Global Nature, a Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography Traveling Exhibition, and The Tree: From the Sublime to the Social at The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, both touring exhibitions.
Gilbert has been teaching art and photography for the past 25 years, and is currently the Director of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Ottawa.
Jennifer Macklem, Director of the Undergraduate Studio Programs
Jennifer Macklem creates sculpture, video, performances, installations, paintings, drawings and public art. With a national and international exhibition record, her artistic practice is experimental in nature. She has presented her work at artist-run centers, university galleries and museums. She completed her undergraduate studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and at the Parsons School of Design. She earned an MFA at the Université du Quebec à Montreal.
Originally from Montreal, Jennifer Macklem is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Ottawa, following a tenured position at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. During the mid 1990’s she served as coordinator/Director/Curator of the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art, based in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Faculty, Studio
Jinny Yu, Professor, Painting
Jinny Yu's practice is an inquiry into the medium of painting as a means of trying to understand the world around us. Her work presented at the 56th Venice Biennale addresses themes about migration, which resonate with larger political concerns globally. Yu works simultaneously to scrutinize conventions and to explore new possibilities within the medium of painting, oscillating between the fields of the abstract painting and the object. Her work has been shown widely, including exhibitions in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Portugal, South Korea, UK and USA.
Martin Golland, Associate Professor, Painting
Martin Golland was born in Montpellier, France in 1975 and has lived in Istanbul, Puerto Rico, Miami, Victoria (BC), and Toronto before moving to Ottawa. Golland received his MFA from the University of Guelph (2006) and his BFA from Concordia University (1998). Golland has exhibited nationally and internationally. He has received the prestigious Honorable Mention Prize at the 11th Annual RBC Painting Competition; exhibited in various museums and galleries across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Power Plant Toronto, the Musée D’art Contemporain in Montreal, and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. Martin Golland is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa.
Andrew Wright, Professor, Photography, Video and New Media
Multidisciplinary artist Andrew Wright creates conceptually informed works in many media. He has also been preoccupied with using photography in traditional and decidedly non-traditional ways for over 25 years.
Wright has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad with shows in the U.S., the U.K., the E.U., Korea, China, and others. He has exhibited at such venues as the London Gallery West, Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Ottawa Art Gallery, the University of California, Berkeley, Oakville Galleries, and the Today Art Museum, Beijing.
His works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the X'ian Art Museum, China, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, KWAG, the University of Toronto, the Ottawa Art Gallery, Canada House Canada’s High Commission in London, and private collections around the world.
Andrew Wright is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa.
Jennifer Macklem, Associate Professor, Sculpture, Painting, Drawing
Jennifer Macklem creates sculpture, video, performances, installations, paintings, drawings and public art. With a national and international exhibition record, her artistic practice is experimental in nature. She has presented her work at artist-run centers, university galleries and museums. She completed her undergraduate studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and at the Parsons School of Design. She earned an MFA at the Université du Quebec à Montreal.
Originally from Montreal, Jennifer Macklem is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Ottawa, following a tenured position at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. During the mid 1990’s she served as coordinator/Director/Curator of the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art, based in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Lorraine Gilbert, Professor, Photography
Lorraine Gilbert has been producing and exhibiting photographic works since 1978. These works have been featured in solo, group and two-person exhibitions such as Global Nature, a Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography Traveling Exhibition, and The Tree: From the Sublime to the Social at The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, both touring exhibitions.
Gilbert has been teaching art and photography for the past 25 years, and is currently the Director of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Ottawa.
Andrew Morrow, Part-Time Professor, Painting
Andrew Morrow is contemporary Canadian artist living in Chelsea, QC, Canada. Morrow's work is characterized by a restless desire to both inhabit and extend Western historical figurative painting. His current practice exists at the intersection of relationality and art, motivated by a desire for connection and community, and grounded in principles of stewardship and accountability. In his work fragmented and archetypal figures populate shifting, uncertain landscapes, approaching, but never quite attaining the sublime. Reflecting an ongoing commitment to materially-based figurative painting, Morrow's practice includes small and large-scale drawings, paintings, and sometimes, installations.
Sarah Rooney, Part-Time Professor, Painting
Sarah Rooney is a visual artist who creates works through a layering of registers. Looking to become witness to subtle spatial conundrums her photography-painting networks present reflections on shifts in distance, immediacy and time. She studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London England before obtaining a BFA from Concordia University and a MFA from York University in Canada. She has exhibited works in Canada and the US, and her painting is represented in the Canada Council Art Bank Collection, as well private collections in Canada, the US and Europe. She has taught at York University and University of Toronto, and she is a Part-Time Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. Sarah Rooney was born in South Africa and spent formative years in Brazil; she lives in Montreal.
David McDougall, Part-Time Professor, Sculpture
Born in Toronto; David McDougall graduated from Queen’s University with a BFA and received his MFA from York University. Beginning his career as a figurative sculptor, he has since broadened his artistic practice to include kinetic and electronic art as well as new media and animation. For the most part, his work revolves around ideas related to technology, A.I., and the environment. David lives and works in Ottawa and is currently a Part-time professor and full-time studio technician in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa.
Ryan Stec, Adjunct Professor, Media Arts
Ryan Stec is an artist, producer, and designer working in both research and production. Beginning his relationship to the moving image through documentary, his practice has slowly expanded off the edges of the screen, increasingly combining light, color, structure and material with deeper consideration of site and the city.
Stec is a PhD candidate at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, Carleton University. His research is focused on the political potential of temporary and informal interventions in the city, and the exploration of new approaches to mapping temporal phenomena.
He has also been heavily involved in the artist-run culture of Ottawa, Canada since 1998, and since 2005 he has been the Artistic Director of Artengine, a non-profit center for art and technology.
Ariane Thézé, Part-Time Professor, Photography
In 1981 Ariane Thézé graduated from the École des beaux-arts d'Angers. In 1982, she moved to Montreal, Quebec, where she obtained a Master's degree in Fine Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1984. She quickly became known as an artist for her work on the representation of the body and exhibited for the first time in 1983 at the Dazibao Gallery in Montreal.
Her first works, photographs of human skins on acrylic polymers suspended from hangers (Déportraitisation, 1983) reveal an artistic approach to the image of the body, and more specifically of her body, by asking questions about identity, desire and memory. In 1986, she returned briefly to France and obtained a second master's degree at the University of Paris I la Sorbonne.
During the 90's her career became international as she exhibited in various museums in France, Spain, Austria and Germany and participated in numerous art film festivals. In 2003, she obtained a doctorate in practical art studies at the Université de Québec à Montréal.
Justin Wonnacott, Part-Time Professor, Photography
Justin Wonnacott was born in Belleville, Ontario in 1950. He is a photographer who also teaches, curates and writes about his subject from time to time. His photography practice spans 40 years. Recent projects include a large body of work dealing with public art in Canada's capital, an extensive examination of Ottawa's Somerset Street West made over a decade, images of fish titled “I remember and I forget”, “Necessary Pictures” which is made within the genre of street photography and most recently, images from the Atlantic and Gulf of St Lawrence shores. These portfolios are all accompanied by publications.
His work is represented in many institutional collections in Canada including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank, the National Archives of Canada, the Carleton University Art Gallery, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Ryerson University Image Centre, the Ottawa Art Gallery and others.
He currently teaches photography at the University of Ottawa in the department of fine arts, he has also taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the Ottawa School of Art.
Chantal Gervais, Part-Time Professor, Photography
Chantal Gervais’ photo and video works deal with representation, identity, human condition and the relationship between the body and technology. Solo exhibitions include Harcourt House Gallery in Edmonton; Art-Image in Gatineau, Québec; McClure Gallery and Vidéographe in Montreal; Galerie Séquence in Chicoutimi, Quebec; and Karsh-Masson Gallery and Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa. She has spoken about her work at institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada. She received the Karsh Award 2014 granted by the City of Ottawa and the Canada Council for the arts’ Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography in 2002. Her work has been supported by several Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the arts and City of Ottawa grants. She received a BFA in photography from the University of Ottawa and an MA in Art and Media Practice from the University of Westminster in London, U.K. She has been a board member at local artist-run centres including Daimon as well as teaching at University of Ottawa and Ottawa School of Art.
Cara Tierney, Adjunct Professor, Sculpture and Performance Art
Cara Tierney (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist, PhD candidate, part-time professor, curator and consultant.
Deborah Margo, Adjunct Professor, Sculpture and Painting
Born in Montreal, Margo lives in Ottawa. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University and a Master of Fine Arts from Temple University/Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She has also studied at the Haystack School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine and the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta. She has experience as a writer and is a faculty member in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa where she teaches drawing, painting and sculpture. During the spring and summer months she also works as a gardener. Deborah Margo's work combines different disciplines including sculpture, drawing and ephemeral installations, questioning architectural and historical contexts of public and private spaces. Focusing on processes and materials relevant to these different contexts, a conversation takes place between a specific site and the materials she works with. Her working process is both conceptual and intuitive, based on research yet open to so-called accidents. Time, change and touch are key preoccupations.
Since 1984, Margo has exhibited in Canada, Mexico and the United States, participating in solo and group projects.
Rosalie Favell, Adjunct Professor
Rosalie Favell is a photo-based artist, born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Drawing inspiration from her family history and Métis (Cree/English) heritage, she uses a variety of sources, from family albums to popular culture, to present a complex self-portrait of her experiences as a contemporary aboriginal woman.
Over the course of her long career, Favell’s work has appeared in exhibitions in Canada, the US, Edinburgh, Scotland, Paris, France, Taipei, Taiwan and Melbourne, Australia. Numerous institutions have acquired her artwork including: National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (Ottawa), Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.), and Global Affairs, Canada. She has received numerous grants, and won prestigious awards such as the Ontario Arts Foundation – Paul DeHuek/Norman Walford Career Achievement Award, the Chalmers Fellowship, the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunten Award and the Karsh Award. A graduate of Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, Rosalie holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico and a PhD (ABD) from Carleton University in Cultural Mediations. In Ottawa Rosalie has taught at Carleton University, the University of Ottawa and Discovery University.
Allison O'Connor, Part-Time Professor, Sculpture
Allison O’Connor is a Franco-Canadian multidisciplinary artist and art administrator working at the intersection of ecology and public art. Her practice emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between artists, audiences, and the ecological context they occupy. Allison generates artworks that consider the environment and its inhabitants by utilizing environmental sciences and consultative practices. She is an MFA graduate from the School of Visual Arts of New York City, in Art Practice, receiving the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for her thesis writing on the use of public art for ecological remediation. This methodology is applied in her role as part of the City of Ottawa's Public Art Program, where she commissions and implements public art.
Jérôme Havre, Part-Time Professor, Painting and Sculpture
Originally from France, Jérôme Havre is a Toronto based artist inspired by the production of natural history dioramas in museums and zoos. He develops in his creations reflexive spaces through immersive processes. He looks for ways to do this through presentation, the creation of situations, or setting the stage with his sculptures and inviting the public to take part “in the show.” Jérôme's work interrogates issues of identity, territory and community through the representation of nature. That is, the manner in which it is presented and yet can be more readily perceived through our cultural filters. According to Jérôme, “nature is deliberately altered in order to deceive us and keep order.” Jérôme completed his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. During his time at the School of Fine Arts he was awarded three scholarships that enabled him to pursue different art practices: silk printing techniques in New York (Cooper Union), printing techniques in Barcelona (Bellas Artes) and painting and video in Berlin (Universität der Künste Berlin - HDK) in the workshop of Marwan Kassab Bashi. Jérôme uses textiles, sculpture, digital prints, photographic images, murals, sound recording, and videos to create scenographic installations. For him, the use of a technological process is not only to accomplish a specific task, but a necessary form of expression itself.
Faculty, Art History
Celina Jeffery, Associate Professor, Art History
Celina Jeffery is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on artistic responses to climate change and environmental degradation, as well as curatorial practice. Recent publications include Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change (2022), Ephemeral Coast (2015), The Artist as Curator (2015), the ‘Junk Ocean’ issue of Drain: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (January 2016) and the ‘Towards a Blue Humanity’ issue of Symploke (2019) co-edited with Ian Buchanan. She is the founder of Ephemeral Coast, a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council)funded, curatorial research project (2015–2019), and has held several SSHRC grants.
Jakub Zdebik, Associate Professor, Art History
Jakub Zdebik received his PhD from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at The University of Western Ontario specializing in Contemporary French Aesthetic Theory. After he obtained his PhD, he became Visiting Research Fellow at The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University. His monograph, entitled Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization, was published by Continuum Press and is based on his doctoral dissertation. This book explores the notion of organizational aesthetics and its representation through the concept of the diagram as it can be observed in modern and contemporary art. He has translated French texts by Guattari and Jean-Clet Martin. He curated an exhibition for the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio entitled Art as Information. He is also working on a monograph on the concept of the map-image.
He has taught at several Canadian universities such as Concordia University, University of Guelph, Carleton University, Trent University as well as teaching at the University of Ottawa for the past several years.
Andrea D. Fitzpatrick, Associate Professor, Art History
Andrea D. Fitzpatrick (they/them; she/her) earned a Ph.D. in art history and critical theory from McGill University in 2005 and has been an Associate Professor of Art History since 2012. Their research focuses on contemporary visual art in all media (especially photography, video, performance, multi-media, and installation), identity, gender, critical race theory, anti-colonial theories, the politics and ethics of representation, as well as images of and resistance to human rights violations during particular wars and conflicts. Currently, they’re exploring contemporary art by diasporic Iranian women in Canada; the life’s work of Iranian-Canadian artist Sadegh Tirafkan; contemporary South African art and exhibitions; Palestinian photographic art and resistance; curatorial support for Global South artists in Documenta exhibitions (#11 - 15) in Kassel, and at the Venice Biennale (#56, 2015); and Holocaust memorials in Berlin. Fitzpatrick has also: presented their research internationally; had their research translated into German, Farsi, and French; and curated exhibitions of Iranian lens-based art at two artist-run centers in Canada (SAW Gallery in Ottawa, and Gallery 44 in Toronto). They are currently working on a book about contemporary art, methodologies, exhibitions, and memorials, and the usefulness of various theoretical and philosophical paradigms to address those areas.
Cristina S. Martinez, Adjunct Professor, Art History
Cristina S. Martinez holds a PhD in Art History and Law from Birkbeck College, University of London, and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She is a faculty member of the International Summer Institute for the Cultural Study of Law, University of Osnabrück, Germany. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century art and culture, especially British art, and the historical interactions between visualisation and law, political satire and libel law. She is also interested in modern and contemporary art, appropriation strategies and copyright law.
Sheena Gourlay, Part-Time Professor, Feminist and Gender Studies
Sheena Gourlay is interested in current art practices and their relation to contemporary theories. Her work has examined the shifts in the visual arts since the 1970s, with special attention to feminist and postcolonial art practices and their relationship with museum practices and the discourses that position and present them. Her primary areas of teaching are Canadian, postmodern, and Indigenous art. She also teaches in Feminist and Gender Studies where she gives courses on feminist theories and methodologies, gender and globalization and anti-colonial and antiracist feminisms, amongst others. Prior to beginning her teaching career, she worked in the artist-run centre system for a number of years in Saskatoon (AKA Gallery) and in Montréal (La Centrale).
Andrea Kunard, Adjunct Professor
Andrea Kunard has an extensive background in photography, both historical and contemporary, Canadian and international. She earned her PhD in 2004 from Queen’s University, and taught survey and seminar courses on the history of photography, Canadian Art (historical and contemporary), and museology for over a decade at Carleton University, Queen's University and Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University. She has published in numerous academic journals, magazines and books such as the International Journal of Canadian Studies, Early Popular Visual Culture, The Journal of Canadian Art History, Muse, BlackFlash, Encyclopaedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, and Photography: Crisis of History (edited by Joan Fontcuberta).
Stefan St-Laurent, Adjunct Professor
Stefan St-Laurent, multidisciplinary artist and curator, is born in Moncton, New-Brunswick, lives and works in Ottawa. He was the invited curator for the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda in 2008, and for the 28th and 29th Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2010 and 2011. From 2002 - 2011, he worked as Curator of Galerie SAW Gallery, and has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual arts at Ottawa University since 2010.
Anna (Ania) Paluch, Part-Time Professor
Anna (Ania) Paluch (she/her) is a Polish-Canadian part-time Art History professor at the University of Ottawa, whose PhD research in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University was about transnational dialogues between Indigenous North American and Eastern European artists, filmmakers and activists. She is also an independent lecturer, curator and artist, being invited to speak at Embassy of Poland events and other Polish community endeavours. Her workshops focus on Polish folk art and forgotten histories, as well as activism for marginalized communities in Poland and Canada. She has spoken at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, Austria, New Zealand, and Germany, and participated in the East Call Curatorial Residency, hosted by Easttopics (Budapest, Hungary) in 2020 (Virtually). Other than academia, she has worked at Minwaashin Lodge for nearly 10 years, at their Indigenous women's shelter and street outreach team.
Recently Published work: “The Baltic Waterways: Mapping Cross-Cultural and Ecological Awareness of the Baltic Sea”, Ephemeral Coast : Visualizing Coastal Climate Change. Ed. Celina Jeffery. Wilmington: Vernon Press,2022.
Chinatsu Kobayashi, Part-Time Professor
Chinatsu Kobayashi was born in Tokyo, Japan. She studied philosophy at the University of Ottawa, with a thesis partly on Collingwood’s aesthetics. After obtaining supplementary credits in Art History at McGill, she began doctoral studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal, during which she spent time as visiting student at the University of Oxford. She wrote her second doctoral thesis on John Ruskin’s aesthetic theory and its influence on British Arts and Crafts and the beginning of Art Nouveau in Europe. She has published a number of papers on Collingwood’s aesthetics, including an edition of some of his letters, and she is now working on publishing parts of her thesis on Ruskin as independent papers. She is also working on Op Art, the conceptions of ‘art as experience’ and the role of interaction in visual arts. She has taught numerous art history classes at the University of Ottawa, in English and in French, covering such topics as contemporary art, globalization in art, and theories of new media art.
Administrative staff
Sylvie Boivin, Administrative Officer
Sylvie Boivin plays a vital role in the Department of Visual Arts as the current Administrative Officer.
Talia M. Boileau, Information Officer
Talia M. Boileau plays a vital role in the Department of Visual Arts as the current Information Officer.
Yekta Çetinkaya, Marketing Assistant and Store Manager
Yekta Çetinkaya is a visual artist from Istanbul, Turkey currently living and working in Ottawa. He graduated from the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of Ottawa in 2022. He currently works at the Department of Visual Arts as the Marketing and Store Manager.
Technicians
David McDougall, Sculpture Technician
David lives and works in Ottawa and is currently a Part-time professor and full-time studio technician in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa.
Sasha Phipps, Photography and Media Arts Technician
Sasha Phipps is an Ottawa-based French-Canadian artist working in video, installation, painting, and public art interventions. He received a college diploma in 3D animation at La Cité collégiale in spring 2006 and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa in the spring of 2010. He maintains an artistic practice in the city of Ottawa and works as the photography and media arts technician for the visual arts department at the University of Ottawa.
Michel Vallières, Woodshop Technician
Michel Vallières plays a vital role in the Department of Visual Arts as he aids students with their sculptural projects, and manages the woodshop.