Montreal-based artist Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama- and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. 

She has received a Governor General’s Award (Visual & Media Arts), Canada Council Research & Creation Grant, Ontario Arts Council Grant (Media Arts), Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and artworks have been published in Canadian Art, Capilano Review, Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada (2019).