Shelley Niro: Scotiabank Award

Ontario-based Native American photographer Shelley Niro is widely known for her ability to explode myths, transgress boundaries and embody the ethos of her matriarchal culture in a wide variety of mediums, including photography, installation, film and painting. Niro creates photographic series that emphasize the medium’s inherent capacity for narrative and representation. She pushes the limits of photography by incorporating Mohawk imagery, reappropriating traditional stories such as Skywoman and The Peacemaker, and by focusing on contemporary subjects with wit, irony and campy humor.

Niro marries portraiture, performance art and satire by having her subjects and herself perform for the camera in ways that gently invite audiences to rethink their beliefs and preconceptions about indigenous peoples and themselves. With compassion and deep insight, Niro opens up the fault lines and desires of gender, sexuality and culture to create images of freedom from the status quo in representation.