About

Treva Legassie (she/they) is a curator, artist and educator born and based in Tkarón:to, Treaty 13 territory. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia University. Her research-creation dissertation takes the form of a curated online exhibition walk that speaks to and from ‘The Narrows’ of Wonscotonach (the Don River) in Tkarón:to. A channelized section of the Lower Don River, The Narrows, has historically been a site of conflict; from the city’s industrial development around the waterway to its use as a site for discarding waste and detritus, a space of refuge, and more recently as a contested site of ecological restoration and rehabilitation. Engaging in a curatorial practice as research-creation, Legassie tends to the many histories and interlocutors of The Narrows as a borderland in Tkarón:to Indigenous and settler colonial histories. As a curator, their process values embodied and incidental knowledge and a commitment to Land and its vast complexity.

Legassie is co-director of the Curatorial Research-Creation Collective. Her writing has been published in RACAR, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, PUBLIC Journal, The Senses & Society, and AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. She has also curated new media based exhibitions such as improvement becomes a wall, and the river meanders still (2022), Femynynytees (2018), #NATURE (2016) and Influenc(Ed.) Machines and co-ordinated Cheryl Sim’s YMX: Land and Loss after Mirabel.

trevamichelle@gmail.com