Lisa Steele

Lisa Steele is a Professor Emerita at John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Steele works in video, photography, film and performance as well as writing and curating on video and media arts. Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1947, Steele studied English literature at the University of Missouri between 1965-1968 until immigrating to Canada in 1968. Steele's videotapes have been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally including: at the Venice Biennale in 1980, the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Canada, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Long Beach Museum. Her videotapes are in many collections including The National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas, Ingrid Oppenheim, Concordia University in Montreal, Newcastle Polytechnic in England, Paulo Cardazzo in Milan, the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Steele and Kim Tomczak have exclusively collaborated to create videotapes, performances, and photo/text works since 1983. They have received numerous grants and honours, including the Governor General's Award for lifetime achievement in Visual & Media Arts in 2005, the Peter Herndorff Award for Media Arts through the Toronto Arts Awards, and the Bell Canada Prize for Excellence in Video Art, both administered by the Canada Council for the Arts. Two public art commissions, one for an outdoor screen in Dundas Square and the other for Watertable, a light display that commemorates the old Lake Ontario shoreline, have been given to them. The University of British Columbia (Okanagan) bestowed honorary doctorates upon Steele and Tomczak in 2009.

At the Wharf Centre d'art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie, a significant exhibition of their photographic and video work debuted in January 2010. The four channel installation piece Becoming..., which was a part of Le Mois de la Photo a Montréal, was in Montreal in September. The Long Time, a travelling exhibition featuring their work from the previous ten years was organized by Paul Wong and debuted in Vancouver in September 2012. The pair subsequently toured A Space Gallery in Toronto in December 2013, Halifax in June 2014, and The Art Gallery of Windsor in September 2015. Steele is also a co-founder of Vtape, a Toronto media arts resource centre.


Media availability: TV, Radio, Print/Online