Professor, researcher, curator, and visual artist born in Happy Valley-Goose Bay (Labrador) in 1979.
Heather Igloliorte, also known as Heather Lynette Igloliorte, was born in 1979 in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. Her mother was originally from Newfoundland and her father, James Igloliorte, was the first Inuk to serve as a judge on the Provincial Court of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Igloliorte family has roots in Hopedale, a village in northern Labrador which is now the legislative capital of Nunatsiavut.
Heather Igloliorte began her career as a visual artist. Like her brother, painter Mark Igloliorte, she graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax with a Bachelor’s degree in 2003; her artistic practice consisted of painting and drawing. That same year, she was involved in a motor vehicle accident that forced her to spend a year in physiotherapy. She then continued her studies at Carleton University in Ottawa (Ontario), where she obtained a Master’s degree in Canadian Art History in 2007 and a PhD in Cultural Mediation in 2013. Heather Igloliorte’s Master’s thesis (2006) examines the influence of Canadian artist, designer, and author James Archibald Houston on the development of Inuit art in Canada’s Eastern Arctic. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Nunatsiavummi Sananguagusigisimajangit. Nunatsiavut Art History: Continuity, Resilience, and Transformation in Inuit Art,” is the first scholarly work of art history dedicated to Nunatsiavut, and made Heather Igloliorte the first Inuk art historian to hold a PhD in Canada. Prior to obtaining her PhD, she was a member of the Board of Directors of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (2005-2011). She is the author of the bilingual (English, French) exhibition catalogue We Were so Far Away: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools / Nous étions si loin : l’expérience des Inuits dans les pensionnats (2008, 2010), in which she shares the testimonies of eight residential school survivors collected in 2008.
In the fall of 2012, Heather Igloliorte joined the Department of Art History at Concordia University (Montréal, Québec), where she held the Concordia University Research Chair in Indigenous Art History and Community Engagement. Her teaching and research activities focus on the visual and material culture of circumpolar Indigenous art; she also seeks to promote of Indigenous art and the reappropriation of Indigenous identity within a colonial context. Heather Igloliorte’s curatorial activities have led to numerous academic publications. In addition to articles published in several edited volumes, she has published three exhibition catalogues: Decolonize Me. Décolonisez-moi (2012), a bilingual (English, French) catalogue of an exhibition presented at the Ottawa Art Gallery in 2012, which later toured Canada from 2013 to 2015; Inuit Art: The Brousseau Collection: Collection Guide (2016), which describes the Inuit art collection at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and was translated into French by Ève Renaud under the title Art inuit : la collection Brousseau : guide de collection (2016); and SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut (2017), a catalogue of SakKijâjuk, an exhibition presented in 2016 in St. John’s, Newfoundland, as part of the 20th biannual Inuit Studies Conference. During this conference, Heather Igloliorte, alongside Britt Gallpen and Mark Turner, co-organized the first iNuit blanche art gallery crawl, in which her brother, Mark Igloliorte, also participated.
Among her many responsibilities, Heather Igloliorte is co-director, with Jason Edward Lewis, of the Indigenous Futures Research Centre (IFRC) at Concordia University. She has sat on the Board of Directors of the Native North American Art Studies Association, the leading authority on the history of Native American art. She is a member of the editorial board of the magazine Inuit Art Quarterly, as well as a member of the boards of the Inuit Art Foundation and the Nunavut Film Development Corporation. As a member of Indigenous advisory committees for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS), and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), Heather Igloliorte holds several positions of authority that allow her to advocate for Inuit communities and their culture. She is involved in preserving the legacy of several Inuit artists: in 2018, she created a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Alootook Ipellie, entitled Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border, for the Carleton University Art Gallery; she also presented Heather Campbell’s ink drawings as part of the exhibition Nunatsiavut – Our Beautiful Land at La Guilde, in Montréal. In 2018, Heather Igloliorte joined a team of Inuit curators, including filmmaker and fellow NSCAD graduate Asinnajaq (Isabella Rose Weetaluktuk) to put together the exhibition Inuk Style for the 2020 opening of the Qaumajuq Inuit Art Centre at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
Through her activities as a teacher, researcher, and curator, Heather Igloliorte seeks to give back to Inuit communities. In 2019, she received significant funding from SSHRC for her project “Supporting Inuit Career, Graduate and Research Capacity in the Arts: Pathways to Best Practices,” which aims to increase Inuit participation in university-based arts research. In 2020, during the restrictions required by the COVID-19 pandemic, she organized online arts and crafts workshops as part of a project, called “De-ice-olation,” which aimed to mitigate the isolation of Inuit and Indigenous artists while promoting the dissemination of their cultures.
After living and teaching in Montreal, Heather Igloliorte now lives in Victoria (British Columbia).