Jess Dobkin has been a working artist, curator, community activist, teacher and mentor for more than
30 years. Her practice extends across theatres and galleries, art fairs and subway stations,
international festivals and museums, universities and public archives. She has operated an
artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk
tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. Her projects have been supported by the Canada
Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council,
the Franklin Furnace Fund for
Performance Art, the
ASTREA
Foundation,
The Theatre Centre , and other
institutional and community
partners. She has taught as a Sessional Lecturer at OCAD University and the University of Toronto
and was a Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of
Toronto. She received a 2018-2019 Chalmers Arts Fellowship to support her research in international
performance art archives and was Artist-in-Residence at the
Hemispheric Institute for
Performance and Politics at New York University. Jess is Performing Archives Lead and
Collaborating Artist of
Hemispheric
Encounters: Developing
Transborder Research-Creation Practices (SSHRC). Recent projects
include her artist commission For What It’s Worth for the
Wellcome Collection, London, UK and her
solo exhibition, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective at the
Art
Gallery of York University (AGYU) curated by Emelie Chhangur. Her first monograph, Jess
Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating Performance
Archives. Edited by Laura Levin and designed by Lisa Kiss Design (Intellect Books/AGYU, 2024)
is now available to purchase
in the US
and
in Canada
and
in
the UK and Europe. Her film and video works are distributed by
Vtape and traces of her performance work are held
in performance art archives internationally.