Marcella Kwe
Marcella Kwe is an artist and scholar. She is Ojibwe from the Gunflint Trail, where the border between canada and the united states goes through the water. She is also an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and has heritage that includes Eastern European ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from sites of memory andopen-ended reflections on place, and the varying relationships between land and language. Through a collision of electronic media, found footage, soundscapes, large-scale projections, and experimental aesthetics she explores critical issues of Native feminisms, kinship, gender, and sexuality.
She holds a PhD in the American Studies Department from the University of New Mexico – using remix theory and sound studies to address how archives of film and photography, historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism, are being reclaimed by visual and sonic scholarship of Native artists. She is a graduate of the University of Washington’s Native Voices master’s program and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Ethnic Studies from Mills College. Marcella is currently with the Department of Art History at the University of New Mexico.