Joanna Householder

Johanna Householder has been making performances and other artwork in Canada since the late 70s. She was a member of the notorious satirical feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes, who performed across Canada and in the US, throughout the 1980s. While The Clichettes practiced their own brand of pop culture détournment, Householder has maintained a unique performance practice, often in collaboration with other artists, including her daughter, Carmen.

As a founder of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, which held its seventh biannual festival in 2008, she has brought many international artists to Canada. She is keenly interested in the histories of performance and and the effect that performance has had in contemporary art, new media, and social perception. Her most recent performance works include a series of performance/lectures based on a lecture by Alain Badiou, On the Subject of Art, and Portrait of a Situation, which was performed in Budapest, Bratislava and Cluj, Romania in 2005. Her collected video works, Approximations 1- 3, produced in collaboration with b.h. Yael, have screened internationally.

Householder writes on performance and contemporary practice and with Tanya Mars, edited Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance by Canadian women, published by YYZ Books, Toronto in 2004. Her work is also represented in Prêt á Emporter / Take Out: Performance Recipes for Public Space, edited by Christine Redfern for La Centrale, Montréal, 2004 and in Jane Wark’s Radical Gestures: Feminism And Performance Art In North America, 2006.

She is a Professor at the Ontario College of Art & Design where she is currently Chair of the Criticism and Curatorial Practice Program.