About
contact
leahdecter@gmail.com
bio
Leah Decter is an inter-media/performance artist and scholar who divides her time between Treaty 1 territory and Kjipuktuk/Halifax, where she is a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies and an Assistant Professor in Media Arts at NSCAD University. Working from a critical white settler perspective her solo and collaborative art and research practices address and disturb social-spatial dynamics of settler colonial whiteness through ethics of intergenerational accountability and being-in-relation.
Decter has received numerous grants and awards for her artwork and research, and has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada including at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, McKenzie Art Gallery, Plugin ICA, Dunlop Art Gallery and Images Festival, and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Malta and India. She has undertaken social practice projects and performances nationally 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, C Magazine, Journal of Canadian Art History and Border Crossings and is represented in collections including, Global Affairs Canada.
Her publications include texts in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, Qualitative Inquiry, Performance Matters and C Magazine (with Tania Willard), chapters in Making (Eco)Logical: Locating Canadian Arts in the Environmental Humanities, Paved Meant (Paved Arts), and, with Carla Taunton, Unsettling Canadian Art History and Settler Responsibilities Towards Decolonisation as well as a special issue of PUBLIC Journalco-edited with Taunton titled “Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures.” She also has texts forthcoming in Performance Matters(with Peter Morin) and The Routledge Companion for Performance Art.
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.
CV (click to view)