VANCOUVER, BC.- The Vancouver Art Gallery announced the appointment of curator, programmer and writer cheyanne turions as the Gallery’s new Director of Education & Public Programs. Commencing on June 7, 2017, cheyanne will lead efforts to unite curatorial content, educational objectives and audience development goals to provide integrated and meaningful ways to engage the Gallery’s diverse audiences.
“We are proud to welcome cheyanne turions to the Gallery, she brings more than ten years of experience as a curator, programmer and writer,” says Director, Kathleen S. Bartels. “The position balances the Gallery’s commitment to making accessible a wide range of core public programming together with building the institution’s profile and awareness, locally and internationally.”
cheyanne is of settler and Indigenous ancestry from the farmlands of Treaty 8. She holds a Master’s degree in Visual Studies from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of British Columbia. cheyanne has worked with institutions nationally and internationally including the Audain Gallery (Vancouver), Jackman Humanities Institute (Toronto), Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Museum of the Near Future (Helsinki), SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art (Montreal) and the Western Front Society (Vancouver). She was recently the acting Artistic Director for Trinity Square Video (Toronto).
In 2014, cheyanne’s exhibition Other Electricities was presented the award for Innovation in a Collections-based Exhibition by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. In 2015, she received the inaugural Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award and the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Emerging Curator of Contemporary Canadian Art Award.
A recent project includes her year-long exhibition, Wood Land School: Kahatènhston tsi na’tetiátere ne Iotohrkó: wa tánon Iotohrha (2017) in collaboration with Duane Linklater and Tanya Lukin Linklater, Walter Scott and facilitated by Montreal’s SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art. Through the Wood Land School project, she will be participating in Under the Mango Tree: Ulterior Sites of Learning—a gathering and publication that addresses new sites for learning to take place in Athens and Kassel as part of documenta 14. The program brings together practitioners from across the world.
From 2008–2017, cheyanne was the director of No Reading After the Internet, a salon series concerned with understanding the act of reading aloud as its own media form. She is a founding member of EMILIA–AMALIA, a feminist working group whose current programming is focused on how to ask a question. Her community volunteer experience includes the Education and Community Engagement Committee, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Board of Directors, Kunstverein, Toronto; Editorial Advisory Committee, C Magazine, Toronto; and Board of Director, Projectile Publishing Society (Fillip), Vancouver.
