Tania Willard
Bio
Tania Willard’s practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centring art as an Indigenous resurgent act though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalisation in Secwépemc communities. She is the Director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia.
Willard’s recent solo exhibitions include Photolithics (2026) at the Polygon Gallery in Vancouver; Practices of Suffusion (2024) at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge; and Sensitized (2023) at Pale Fire in Vancouver. Her work is featured in rememory (2025) the 25th Edition of the Biennale of Sydney; Soundings:An Exhibition in Five Parts (2019–25), at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queens University in Kingston, the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre, 516 Arts in Albuquerque, et.al; and Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) (2022) at HKW, Berlin.
Her artworks are included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others.
She is the winner of the 2025 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s highest honour for contemporary artists. In 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice; and In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.
Willard’s independent curatorial work includes, Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology co-curated with Dr. Kóan Jeff Baysa, Satomi Igarashi, Erin Vink, and Manuela Well-Off-Man at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe (2022-ongoing); Nanitch: Early Photographs of British Columbia from the Langmann Collection, co-curated with Heather Caverhill and Helga Pakasaar at Presentation House Gallery (now The Polygon Gallery) in North Vancouver (2016); and Beat Nation: Hip Hop and Indigenous Culture, co-curated with Skeena Reece at grunt gallery online, which became the major touring exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, co-curated with Kathleen Ritter at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012–2014).