Suzanne Morrissette

smorrissette@ocadu.ca
Assistant Professor, Tenure-Track
Faculty of Arts & Science
Indigenous art
ethical relationality
equity practices and history
arts-based research
curatorial studies
critical race studies
Canadian art
socially engaged practice
artist run centre history and culture

Suzanne Morrissette, PhD (she/her) is a Red River Métis artist, curator, and scholar who is currently based out of Toronto. She is currently Associate Professor at OCAD University where she teaches in the Indigenous Visual Culture BFA, and in the Criticism and Curatorial Practices MFA programs. As an arts-based researcher Suzanne’s interests include: reciprocal and gift economies, equity and diversity, as well as culturally informed governance models in the arts. As an artist she works across media to produce artworks that reflect upon metaphors for love and the unknowable, and motherhood. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (Painting + Ceramics) MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practices from OCAD University and a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University.

Recent artistic projects include: to notice, a 150’ installation of light and shadow for Nuit Blanche Etobicoke, and an audio-visual commission by imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival called Where they begin I continue. Her solo exhibition What does good work look like? opened at Gallery 44 (Toronto) in 2022 and travelled to C’CAP (Winnipeg) in 2023. In 2025 she will open two solo exhibitions: One at ASpace Gallery, and another at the Durham Art Gallery. Recent curatorial projects include: How can I know you? a group show about the agency of land-based material at the Art Gallery of Burlington, and Otakosik Tapwa’win, an interactive online oral history project with Indigenous artists in Winnipeg from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. She has published with cmagazine. Her forthcoming book But have we arrived? explores the liberalism’s failed promises to Indigenous artists, and is contracted to ARP Books with a planned for release in late 2025.

Suzanne, alongside her collaborator Jaimie Isaac, runs ROSEMARY Gallery, a roving gallery — born on the prairies out of the needs and aspirations of artists for the promotion of arts-based projects that grow from the families and communities with whom artists and arts workers are in relation. It emerges from the belief that art is rooted in our relationships to others in our neighbourhoods, communities, and cities, and that galleries are responsible to the needs of those geographies. ROSEMARY operates with a mandate to responsively engage in and care for Indigenous and BPOC communities through critical arts-based projects including exhibitions, performances, public discussions, community feasts, and celebrations.

Morrissette’s father’s parents were Michif- and Cree-speaking Metis with family histories tied to the Interlake and Red River regions and Scrip in the area now known as Manitoba. Her mother’s parents came from Canadian-born farming families descended from United Empire loyalists and Mennonites from Russia. Morrissette was born and raised in Winnipeg and is a citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation.