Curator, writer, and artist, Emelie Chhangur, is the newly appointed Director and Curator of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. This appointment follows a significant curatorial career at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU). At AGYU, she led the reorientation of the gallery to become a civic, community-facing, ethical space driven by social process and intersectional collaboration; she founded the gallery’s residency program and received 25 OAAG awards for her contributions in writing, publishing, exhibition-making, public and education programming. Over the past 20 years, Emelie has emerged as a leading voice for experimental curatorial practice in Canada and is celebrated nationally and internationally for her process-based, participatory curatorial practice. She has published numerous books on contemporary art and regularly contributes articles to art journals, peer review essays to anthologies, and presents her research at conferences internationally.

Questioning the contemporary art gallery’s civic role, her concept of “in-reach” has transformed institutional practice in the arts across Canada. ““In-reach”, she explains, “is an organic process that I started to think formally about only after making long-term projects that, by their very nature, were putting pressure on the art institution’s processes and protocols. Instead of the art gallery going out to communities or to deliver programs in other locales, I became more interested in the ways in which different social economies, different modes of cultural production, and different cultural protocols could come into the institution to transform it from within.”

Her awards include the Ontario Association of Art Galleries’ inaugural BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) Changemaker Award, The Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence, and she was a finalist for the Margo Bindhardt and Rita Davies Cultural Leadership Award. She holds a Master of Visual Studies from the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.

Appearing in 30. Last Chapter Brunch: Foraged Flavours