Artist-In-Residence

Jess Dobkin (she/her) has been a performance artist, curator, community activist, teacher, and mentor for more than 30 years, creating and producing intimate solo theatre performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions, and performance art workshops and lectures. Her projects have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the ASTREA Foundation, The Theatre Centre, and other institutional and community partners. She received a 2018-2019 Chalmers Arts Fellowship to support her research in international performance art archives and was Artist-in-Residence at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at New York University. Recent projects include What We Crave (2024),  a performance art piece that explores the magic of queer and feminist gathering; a commissioned art installation for the Wellcome Collection in London, For What It’s Worth, about the politics, ethics, and value of human milk exchange in the 21st century; and her solo exhibition, Wetrospective at the Art Gallery of York University that centered the polytemporal, feminist, and queer experience of “an archive of possible futurities,” which led to the publication of her first monograph, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating Performance Archives, edited by Laura Levin and designed by Lisa Kiss Design (Intellect Books/AGYU, 2024). Her film and video works are distributed by Vtape and traces of her performance work are held in performance art archives internationally. While with the QTRL, Dobkin will begin new project entitled Archives of Queer Possibilities that will engage the Sexual Representation Archive (SRA), housed by the Bonham Centre, and will result in a public exhibition and live performance in 2027.

Photo credit: David Hawe

Previous Artists-in-Residence

2025-26: Theo Cuthand

2024-25: Vivek Shraya

2023-24: Jody Chan and Brian Rigg

2022-23: Rhoma Spencer

2021-22: Teiya Kasahara 笠原 貞野

2020-21: Michèle Pearson Clarke