Stephen Foster

Stephen Foster is an electronic media artist and researcher of mixed Haida and European heritage
whose work deals with issues of Indigenous representation in popular culture through personal
narrative. Foster’s multi-channel video and interactive video installations, photography and single
channel video works have been presented in galleries and film and media festivals across Canada
as well as in New Zealand, Sweden, Germany and the United States. He has presented lectures
and has participated on panels for new media, video art and contemporary Indigenous art at
national and international venues. Currently, Foster is the Dean, Faculty of Art at the Ontario
College of Art and Design University (OCADU) in Toronto. Before moving to OCADU he
served as Head of the Creative Studies Department was Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and
Research, both at UBC Okanagan University.
Foster’s interactive installation entitled The Prince George Métis Elders’ Documentary Project
has been exhibited at various galleries and festivals and in 2009 the project was nominated for the
Best New Media Work at the ImagineNative Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto. His
interactive web-art project entitled Kiss and Tell was also nominated in 2010 at ImagineNative
and has been collected by NT2 at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His current projects
include a multi-phase digital photo and interactive video installation project entitled Re-mediating
E.S. Curtis Project, which has been exhibited at variety of galleries in BC including the Kelowna
Art Gallery, the Vernon Public Art Gallery in 2013 as well as the Surrey Art Gallery and Kootney
Art Gallery in 2015 and 2017 respectively. Recently, Foster has participated in the group
exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum, entitled Native Portraiture: Power and Perception (2019-
2021), where he exhibited two large scale lightboxes from the Remediating E.S. Curtis Project:
Toy Portrait series. In 2017 He participated in the exhibition Transformer: Native Art in Light
and Sound at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York. The
exhibition included the interactive audio and video installation, Raven Brings the Light, which
was purchased by the Smithsonian in 2019. Stephen Foster continues to create new work in
photography, video and sound while he fulfills his role as a Dean in Canada’s oldest and largest
post-secondary art school.