Megan(dot)Smith(at)uregina(dot)ca
@cawsand on twitter
Megan Smith PhD is a new media artist and curator. Her art practice probes new systems for delivering syndicated data through narrative structure and she often works with geo-location, live-feed installation, performance, and community projects as methods for storytelling. In December 2015 she embarked on a durational performance in physical computing called ‘Riding Through Walls’ which involves a live-cast cross-Canada cycle through Google Street View, from her studio in Regina. This project is part of the 2016 Project Anywhere global exhibition. In July 2016, she will take part in the Canadian Wilderness Artist Residency and canoe a 700 km stretch of the Yukon River between Whitehorse and Dawson City with 10 artists as part of her growing series of research called ‘Adrift’. In 2015, she partook in a 12 day art residency, curated by the Department of Biological Flow and supported by the SenseLab travelling from Lake Ontario through the Rideau waterway system to Ottawa by canoe. During this time, she mapped and collected zooplankton samples on route. She has also been a resident artists at the Pelling Lab, University of Ottawa where she worked with researchers to image the zooplankton samples.
Her work has been shown internationally and most recently at ‘The Works Art Festival’, Edmonton (June 2015), ‘Conversations électroniques’, La Panacée, Montpellier, France (June-December 2013) and Electric Fields, Ottawa (September 2013).
Smith was Creative Director and co-Founder of Canada’s national capital Nuit Blanche festival (2012-2015), a pop-up Contemporary Art event focused on embedding temporary transformative projects into public spaces. The festival annually hosted over a hundred artists from diverse areas of practice and was regularly attended by thousands of smiling people. Smith holds a PhD in Contemporary Art & Graphic Design from Leeds Beckett University and is Assistant Professor in Creative Technology within the Faculty of Media+Art+Performance at the University of Regina.