Shauna Janssen

Shauna Janssen

Department:
shauna janssen

Shauna Janssen is a Montreal-based urban curator with a background in professional theatre practice, and interdisciplinary studies. Within the context of urban change, in her curatorial practice she works with artists to create site responsive performances, interventions, installations, and collaborative community projects. In 2010, she founded Urban Occupations Urbaines, a curatorial platform for artists, communities and the public to creatively and critically engage with cities and urban change. Her curatorial work involves long-term documentary and site-specific research projects.expand

In her practice she asks how critical curation can be a mode of intervention in the public realm, and how neighbourhoods in transition might be active collaborators, with artists, in the surfacing of significant pasts, sublimated political positions, and forms of cultural agency, including the agencies of the built environment itself. She is working with oral history, critical post humanist thought, feminist and queer theory to rethink sites, discourses, and themes such as spatial agency, the public sphere, gender, class, race, gentrification and the right to the city.  Her ongoing research addresses the cultural politics of postindustrial urban spaces, and the role of art/ists in creating politically engaged communities in these spaces. She is currently undertaking research on the role of digital and new media in the public sphere in relation to expanded scenographic practices and concepts such as spatial dramaturgy and performative urbanism. She received her Ph.D in Humanities (2014), Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, where she has also taught in the Departments of Theatre and Art History.