Curator Facilitator Cultural Animator Organizer Dreamer

Roewan Crowe is an artist, activist and interdisciplinary scholar who is energized by acts of disruption. She has a particular passion for creating community, facilitating initiatives in cultural democracy and participating in performance activism. In her varied practice she employs a 'feminist curiosity' and irreverently crafts together academic prose, poetry, theory, photography, performance, fiction, activism and video. She has published stories, poems, theory and art including "Crafting Tales of Trauma: Will This Winged Monster Fly?" in Provoked by Art: Theorizing Arts-Informed Inquiry; "Angelic Artful Encounters" in The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing Special Issue: Performances in Arts-Based Inquiry; "Feminist Encounters with the Hollywood Western" in Sites of Production: Film, History, and Cultural Citizenship.

In the summer of 2007 she launched digShift, a series of video poems that delve into shifting layers of meaning at an abandoned gas station. For over 15 years she reluctantly yet faithfully returned to this site from her past to take photographs, perform, write, theorize, dig, and shoot video in an attempt to imagine some sort of reclamation – personal, historical, and environmental – for this compelling and toxic landscape. The site came to symbolize the excesses of the West – both the prairie West and the "first world" West – and the processes of colonization, industrialization, and environmental destruction. During her artistic engagement, she imagined removing the rusting gas tanks that lay beneath the earth, leaking contaminants into the soil and ground water. Through a commitment to sustained artistic process, the tanks were removed and the gas station was transformed into a landscape of hope and possibility. In this installation she works with video, poetry, and a queer equation to fathom the uncanny process that unfolded there. As part of the exhibit she launched the artist chapbook, Second dig, published with As We Try & Sleep Press.

Currently she is working on "Decolonizing the Imagination: Art Contesting Military Violence." This arts-informed research project explores the ways in which art creates space for forbidden narratives and contests and interacts with massive political processes such as economic globalization and militarism. As well as teaching in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of Winnipeg, she is the Academic Director of The Institute for Women's & Gender Studies.

Ms Citizenship Crew, Performance Activism, International Women's Day 2008
(Vivian, Meredith, Roewan, Sarah, Kelly, Natasha, Jacqueline)