Olivia Shortt

(They/He/She - only if used in rotation, otherwise ‘They’// Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation // ireland + canada) Olivia Shortt is a weirdo, noisemaker, video artist, wannabe fashion icon, curator, and troublemaker. Shortt's work is inspired by their love of camp, drag, and gender expression and its relation to Indigeneity. Shortt was featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine.

Highlights include Shortt’s world premiere performance of ‘For Olivia Shortt’ Pulitzer Prize that Diné composer Raven Chacon wrote for Shortt (as part of Chacon’s series ‘For Zitkala-Ša’ featured at The 2022 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC); their Lincoln Center (NYC) debut playing percussion in 2018 with the International Contemporary Ensemble (Shortt is NOT a percussionist FYI); their film debut in Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film ‘Guest of Honour’; recording an album of Robert Lemay’s music two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB, a Neutrino laboratory in Sudbury, Canada; and performances of Raven Chacon’s music at The Holland Festival in Amsterdam and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC).

Shortt was a finalist for the 2021 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award, winner of NUMUS’ 2019/2020 Emerging Curators Competition and was named and awarded one of the 2020 Buddies in Bad Times Emerging Queer Awards.

In 2023-24 they were the Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University’s Music Department and the University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, as well as the Indigenous Curator-in-Residence at Hamilton Arts Inc. Their favourite song is ‘House of the Rising Sun’, they love glitter, drinking coffee and hanging out with their cat Violet. www.oliviashortt.com