kurtis lesick | Bio
Photo by Blake Little
Kurtis Lesick is an artist, writer, researcher, and award-winning creative content specialist. Lesick’s, installations, location-based interventions, media works, digital performances, and cross-media collaborations occupy a space of praxis-based philosophy navigating between the physical world, and our knowledge, perception, and (mis)representation of it. Lesick’s work draws heavily on his experience in archaeology, anthropology and philosophy, as well as both his love and disdain for technology. A hybridiser of artefacts, text, video and a variety of opportunistic media, Lesick’s work explores phenomenologies that reframe the relationships between knowledge, time, and materiality.
Lesick is the past Chair of the School of Craft + Emerging Media, and Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, where he teaches in Media Arts, and directs the Creative Environment for Emerging Electronic Culture. He’s also held an adjunct professorship and taught at the Digital Futures Initiative in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and has been visiting faculty at the Banff Centre and the University of California at Irvine. In 2012, Lesick was awarded the inaugural People’s Choice Award for the Most Inspirational Digital Leader at the Digital Alberta Awards.
Lesick has overseen the development of several large-scale online properties, written and creative directed the KidScreen award winning ‘Technosaurs’ project, and has consulted for such leading arts and media organizations as the Banff New Media Institute, the Calgary Arts Development Authority, Canadian Heritage, the National Film Board of Canada, the Union of BC Performers, Association of Alberta Colleges and Technical Institutes, and University of California-Irvine. His work and research have been presented throughout Canada, the United States, Spain, Italy, and Greece, and was recently featured in Michael Petry’s (Curator, London MOCA) survey of text-based art: The Word is Art, Thames and Hudson.