Shea Chang

Shea Chang is a Canadian artist and educator, whose interdisciplinary practice spans drawing, painting, installation, and publication. Her work constructs visual languages that explore queer spaces, transformative phenomena, and objects of compounded otherness. Drawing from vintage ephemera, East Asian decorative objects, and industrial by-products, Shea creates hybrid forms that carry layered histories across social, technological, and ecological thresholds. Through iterative processes of blurring, amalgamation, interruption, and erasure, her work examines the collective body as unsettled and continually shifting, producing images that evoke the primal, archaeological, ephemeral, uncanny, and haunting while resisting fixed or singular states of being.

Born in Vancouver and based between Toronto and Hamilton, Shea has developed solo and collaborative projects across Canada and internationally over the past two decades. Early in her career, her illustrated children’s book Tarentelle was named a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, establishing a practice that has continued to move fluidly between contemporary art, publishing, and visual storytelling. Her work has been presented by organizations and platforms including Mepaintsme, CBC Arts, Opaloma, Regional Archive, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Clvb (Detroit), Objectifs (Singapore), and art book fairs in Tokyo and Bergen. In 2026, her work was featured in The Drawing Stall Vol. 2 and exhibited at Stellarhighway in New York.

Shea holds a Diploma of Fine Arts from Langara College, a Bachelor of Design in Illustration from OCAD University, and an MFA in Visual Art from York University. She is the recipient of a 2019 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) scholarship and the 2020 Samuel Sarick Purchase Prize. Currently, Shea is the principal investigator on an SSHRC Explore Research Seed Grant examining institutional press models for art and design dissemination and publication, extending her longstanding engagement with publishing as both a creative practice and research methodology.

Shea Chang is an Associate Professor and Program Chair of Illustration in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto, where her teaching, research, and academic leadership advance contemporary illustration, publishing, and interdisciplinary art practices. She maintains a studio practice in Hamilton, Ontario.