Suzanne Morrissette, PhD (she/her) is a Red River Métis artist, curator, and scholar who is currently based out of Toronto. She is currently Assistant Professor at OCAD University where she teaches in the Indigenous Visual Culture BFA program, and in the Criticism and Curatorial Practices MFA program. 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 the knowledege. She holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practices from OCAD University and a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University.
Recent artistic projects include: ENTendre, a solo exhibition at a space gallery (toronto), 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. 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.
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.
