Heather Igloliorte

Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department (2023-). Heather formerly held a Tier 1 University Research Chair in Circumpolar Indigenous Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, QC, where she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and co-director of the Indigenous Futures Research Centre with Prof. Jason Edward Lewis. Since 2018 Heather has directed the nation-wide Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership: The Pilimmaksarniq / Pijariuqsarniq Project (2018-2025), a SSHRC-funded partnership grant which supports Inuit postsecondary students to explore professional career paths in all aspects of the arts, including collections management, curatorial practice, arts administration and other areas of the visual and performing arts, in order to address the longstanding absence of Inuit in agential positions within Canadian art history and museum practice.

Heather has been an independent curator since 2005, when she curated her first exhibition at the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG). Her first major exhibition, the oral history project “We Were So Far Away”: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools (2008-, Ottawa, Legacy of Hope Foundation), is still in circulation across Canada today. She has created or co-created more than thirty curatorial projects throughout her career. The exhibition she developed with her community, SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut, toured across Canada from 2016 - 2020 and was awarded the 2017 Award of Outstanding Achievement in Education from the Canadian Museums Association. With asinnajaq, Kablusiak, and Krista Ulujuk Zawadski, Igloliorte curated the inaugural exhibition of the new Inuit art centre, Qaumajuq, INUA: Inuit Nunangat Ungammuaktut Atautikkut (Inuit Moving Forward Together) which opened in March 2021 at Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq and was on view until 2023. A ground-breaking survey exhibition of contemporary Inuit art from Alaska, Canada, and Greenland – together, Inuit Nunaat - INUA featured over one hundred works made by dozens of artists in diverse media ranging from sound and video, painting, textile work, wearable art, installation, sculpture, and more. INUA included fifteen new commissions from internationally renowned Inuit, Inuvialuit, Inupiat and Kalaallisut artists. Another recent project, Among All These Tundras (2018-2021), co-curated with Amy Prouty and Charissa von Harringa, featured contemporary art by twelve circumpolar Inuit and Sami artists, and toured across Canada and internationally from 2018 – 2021, concluding its tour in Porirua, New Zealand at Pataka Art + Museum. Heather has curated projects at festivals and events as well, and some of her notable solo and co-curated exhibitions include Decolonize Me (2011-2015) and ARCTIC XR/ ARCTIC AR (2022), presented in conjunction with Árran 360° at the Sami Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. In recognition of her significant contributions to curatorial practice in Canada, in 2021 Igloliorte was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation's Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.

In addition to her curatorial practice, Igloliorte teaches curatorial studies, critical museology, global Indigenous art history and research-creation at the University of Victoria. Heather publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice; she has co-edited four books including The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada (2022); Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022); Promoting and Protecting the Arts and Cultural Expressions of Indigenous Peoples Experiences of Misuse and Misappropriation, and Emerging Tools and Solutions (2021); and Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023). She has co-edited special issues of scholarly journals and popular magazines such as the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art (2023), PUBLIC 54: Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital (2016), Inuit Art Quarterly, and RACAR: Continuities Between Eras: Indigenous arts (2017). Her article “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art Museum,” which draws upon the permanent exhibition Ilippunga: the Brousseau Inuit Art Collection (2016, Quebec, MNBAQ) advances new ways of curating and interpreting Inuit art from an emic perspective, and was awarded the 2017 Distinguished Article of the Year from Art Journal.

In addition to serving on many art and research related advisories, councils and juries, Igloliorte currently serves as the President of the Board of the Inuit Art Foundation and on the Faculty Council of the Otsego Institute for Native American Art History at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, which trains emerging curators and art historians in understanding collections. She recently served on the Board of Directors for North America's largest Indigenous art historical association, the Native North American Art Studies Association, and is the former Co-Chair of the Indigenous Circle for the Winnipeg Art Gallery (2018-2021), working collaboratively with Indigenous stakeholders from across the country on the decolonization of the institution. In 2021 she became the first Indigenous person to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists.