Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time.
She is a recipient of numerous grants and award including Concordia University’s 2022 Provost’s Circle of Distinction Award, 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, 2020 Governors General Award, 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize.
Her writing, interviews and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.
October 2022: German publisher Steidl is releasing a monograph on Bowen’s work that includes essays by Crystal Mowry, director of programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan and Kimberly Phillips, director of the Simon Fraser University Galleries in Vancouver and Burnaby, British Columbia.
Deanna lives and works in Montreal, QC where she is an Assistant Professor of Intersectional Feminist and Decolonial 2D-4D Image Making and Co-Director of the Post Image Cluster at Concordia University
Her work is in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Colgate University, New York, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, TD Bank, RBC, Scotiabank, Hydro Quebec and the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco among many others.
Refereed Publications
2019: Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts Practices in Canada. Ed. Deanna
Bowen. Toronto: PUBLIC Books, 2019
2018: “sum of the parts: what can be named,” in The Black Prairie Archives: An
Anthology. Ed. Karina Vernon. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press
2017: “Hunting the Nigs in Philadelphia: Or An Alternate Chronology of
Events Leading Up to and One Year Beyond the Columbia Avenue
Uprisings, August 28-30, 1964.” Transition, No. 124, “Writing
Black Canadas” (2017). Eds. Phanuel Antwi and David Chariandy.
Cambridge: Indiana University Press on behalf of the
Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
at Harvard University.
Non-Refereed Publications
2020: “A Centenary of Influence,” with Maya Wilson-Sanchez. Canadian Art Magazine, “Influence” Issue. Spring 2020
2017: “Cicely Nicholson and Deanna Bowen in Conversation.” The Capilano Review, Spring 2018/3.32
“Notes from The Long Doorway.” Six artist pages in Canadian Art Magazine “The Idea of History” Issue. Fall 2017
