Pam Patterson - Performance Artist

Welcome to a web version of my work as a woman, feminist and performance artist.

I have a PhD (OISE) and have for 25 years, been active in the health, art, theatre and women’s communities. My research, performance and teaching have focussed on embodiment in art practice, the "body" in art, women and health, disability studies, women’s studies and feminist art education with publications in journals such as: Studies in Art Education, Resources for Feminist Research, Matriart: A Canadian Feminist Art Journal, FUSE, Fibrearts, Parachute and presentations in conferences such as: the Feminism and Art Conference (Toronto), History of Art Education Symposium (Penn State), and Moving Bodies, Embodying Movement: Exploring the Rhetoric of the Body (State University of New York, Brockport).

I have taught for various institutions such as: Sheridan College, George Brown College, Ryerson Polytechnical University and the University of Toronto. I was, this past year, Course Director for Visual Culture and Gender and Drama & Arts Education at York University, Graduate Program, Faculty of Education and am now teaching in Women Studies at the University of Waterloo and acting as Visiting Scholar for the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto where I curate exhibitions and direct Women in Action, an interdisciplinary program in arts practice, arts-informed research, women and activism. She also teache at the Toronto School of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

As a performance and visual artist I have exhibited and performed across Canada. Recently, I presented a new performance work, Body as Site/sight for A Space & 7A11D International Performance Art Festival in Toronto and lectured and performed works from the "Body in Extremis" series for Psi: Being Uncomfortable, Brown University, Rhode Island, Towards Tomorrow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and on Performance as Pedagogy for the Universities Art Association, Victoria. This past year, I performed Body as Site/sight for York University (The Congress), Toronto and my new work, Canc(h)er for Collision 2006, University of Victoria. My paper, A Performance: The Body grotesque as political site/sight? was presented at Interfaces, Carleton University and my research on transgressive pedagogies at Lesley University, Cambridge, Mass. and is being developed further for the UAAC conference this fall.