Visiting Assistant Professor

Art

Ellyn Walker is an interdisciplinary arts scholar and curator from Toronto, Treaty 13 territory. Her work explores questions of representation and place-making in the arts as they pertain to distinct positional, cultural, and institutional contexts. Ellyn's research considers intersections between whiteness, diaspora, heteropatriachy, settler-colonialism, and capitalism, within contemporary museum practice, critical art history, and visual culture. Her work is inspired by Black feminism, Indigenous methodologies, queer phenomenology, and critical settler studies, and is driven by an ongoing commitment to social justice in all its forms. 

Ellyn’s training in art history, visual culture, curatorial studies, and cultural studies, frame the interdisciplinary nature of her work. She has participated in residencies with the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and New York University in Chiapas, Mexico, as well as with Dal Al’Kalima University in Bethlehem, Palestine. Her doctoral research focused on decolonial curatorial methodologies used in contemporary exhibition-making and museum practice in Canadian art institutions and beyond. Ellyn is currently working on a co-edited anthology with Michelle Jacques titled Curatorial Contestations: Critical Exhibition-Making Practices in Canada that explores diverse curatorial pedagogies and alternative projects from across the lands now known as Canada. 

Ellyn’s writing has been widely published in books, catalogues, journals, magazines, and online, including in Inuit Art Quarterly, Blackflash, Public, Journal of Curatorial Studies, RACAR, Prefix Photo, Reconstruction, FUSE, and in the books Making (Eco)Logical: Locating Canadian Arts in the Environmental Humanities (Wilfred Laurier Press, 2023), Craft on Demand: The New Politics of the Handmade (Bloomsbury, 2021), and in Sonny Assu: A Selective History (Heritage House, 2018). Her chapter “Resistance as Resilience in the Work of Rebecca Belmore” in the anthology Desire/Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press & MAWA, 2017) is used in curricula and reading groups across North America.

Ellyn’s curatorial projects have been presented by artist-run centres, public galleries and museums, art festivals and biennales, universities, cultural centres and community spaces across Canada, and internationally, such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Thames Art Gallery, The Gardiner Museum, YYZ Artists Outlet, Trinity Square Video, The Bows, Contact Photography festival, the Berlinale, and The ArQuives, formerly known as the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. Recent projects include Interrelations: A Third Perspective (2023), a solo exhibition of artist Abdi Osman’s work at the Campbell River Art Gallery in British Columbia with public billboards by writers Cecily Nicholson and Rinaldo Walcott; Wish You Were Here, Wish Here Was Better (2022), a mobile public art project and event series that made space for people impacted by the ongoing overdose crisis—and its cascading systemic issues of precarity, houselessness, and criminalization; and Meeting Places (2021), a curated public lightbox program across the University of Toronto Mississauga campus. Since 2011, she has collaborated with artist Abdi Osman on a number of exhibitions and public art projects.

From 2021-2022, Ellyn was the Acting Director/Curator of The Blackwood university art gallery, where she was also cross-appointed as Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies department at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She has taught at Queen’s University in the Gender Studies department, and as part of the 2022 Summer Institute: Curatorial Edition hosted by Queen’s, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Feminist Art Residency. Ellyn recently served as an Advisory Member for the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto and is currently an Advisor for The Alchemy Lecture Series at York University, Toronto, Canada.

Awards

Research Excellence Award, Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada
WJ Barnes Teaching Excellence Award, Faculty of Arts & Science, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
Thematic Exhibition of the Year Award, Ontario Association of Art Galleries, Canada