Neven Lochhead, PhD, is an artist, filmmaker, curator, and educator from Kingston, Ontario, currently based in Montreal, Quebec.

Contact | neven.lochhead [at] gmail.com

CV | October 2024

Doctorate | Lochhead received his PhD in April 2024 from Queen’s University’s Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program, for his book-length dissertation and portfolio An Artist’s Almanac to Research, Organization, Education, and Bookings. The doctoral project’s External Examiner, Neil Mulholland (Edinburgh College of Art) notes that the Artist’s Almanac “identifies and overcomes an impasse in the field of artistic research that has emerged from a monocular fixation with the three bogey men – ‘financialization’, ‘professionalization’ and ‘homogenization’ – at the expense of post-rationalist experimentation.” Divided into four theoretically diverse sections, the Almanac blends together methodological analysis with applied experimentation to examine the epistemological possibilities of artmaking as a form of knowledge, propose a theory of curatorial practice through the lens of organizational studies, develop an educational philosophy that is driven by sonic phenomena, and launch a speculative academic discipline called Booking Studies.

Exhibition-Making | Lochhead worked with Agnes Etherington Art Centre on various art and curatorial projects during his PhD, from 2020-2024. This included a solo video exhibition From the vibe out (2020), which unfolded across different platforms as a video installation, a four-part radio art program, a live online performance, and a working group called “Fabricating Vibe.” He later developed the discursive group show a guest + a host = a ghost (2022) alongside Sunny Kerr, which won Exhibition of the Year at the 2022 GOG Awards, and for which Lochhead designed an artistic research and residency platform called “Paranormal Curation.” In summer 2024, Dr. Malini Guha (Carleton University) commissioned Lochhead through her SSHRC grant “On Traction: Moving Images and Their Realities,” to develop a research cluster re-examining the long-standing relationships between moving images and reality. This resulted in the interdisciplinary platform Something Happened, which unfolded in Tamworth, Ontario, and culminated in a barn-based exhibition of the same name.

Educational Practice | At Queen’s, Lochhead developed the original undergraduate theory and production course, Sound + Synthesis, which blended sound studies and audio production with film criticism and reception. The itinerant course, occurring in various locations on campus, in off-site satellite galleries, and in public space, would go on receive the Dean’s Teaching Fellow Award in 2023 in acknowledgement of Lochhead’s “exceptional commitment to teaching” and “high-impact curriculum design.” The course is currently being transformed into an Open Educational Resource, to be published by Queen’s University Library in January 2025.

Organizational Work | Lochhead was the Director of Programming at SAW Video Media Art Centre in Ottawa from 2016 – 2019, where he expanded the organization’s programming capacity and reach. This involved designing and launching a media art presentation venue called Knot Project Space, which featured various exhibitions, discussions, performances and events by local and international artists through an inquiry-driven and community-facing curatorial method. Lochhead also built and oversaw a year-long commissioning structure called “Video in the Public Sphere” that engaged a working group of five local commissioned artists, the Ottawa public, and a series of visiting scholars in the development of original video works intended for large-scale projection on architectural façades. This platform resulted in the city-wide exhibition Imagining Publics in 2019, which activated five outdoor sites around Ottawa from August – November 2019.

Collaborative Filmmaking | As a filmmaker, Lochhead is working in close collaborative relationships with leading Indigenous artists and scholars, especially Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom he made various dance-driven films from 2017-2022, including The treaty is in the body (2017, TATE Modern), An amplification through many minds (2019, SFMOMA) and not like us; Not like us (2022, Oakville Galleries). Lochhead has also been working with the artist, curator and writer Dylan Robinson on various films and research projects since 2021, most recently completing Amuksism. You really have to listen. – a documentary funded by the Canadian Music Centre and Canadian Heritage that follows an Indigenous-centered practice of song repatriation and repair in the context of a major, multi-institutional, national arts production.

Current | Beginning in October 2024, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at UBC’s School of Music, Lochhead will be developing and shooting a multi-narrative documentary project examining a series of interwoven processes of song repatriation and return, stemming in part from the research group Xóxelhmetset te Syewá:l | Caring for Our Ancestors: Reconnecting Indigenous Songs with Community and Kin, initiated by Dylan Robinson and Patrick Nickleson, of which Lochhead has been a participant since 2021.