Short bio:

Canadian media artist Penny McCann's body of work spans three decades and encompasses dramatic, experimental, and documentary films. Her works have been exhibited at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Centre national d’art contemporain (Grenoble, France), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, Michigan) the Hamburg International Short Film Festival (Hamburg, Germany), the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa), and the Cinémathèque Québecoise. (Montreal).

Longer bio:

Canadian media artist Penny McCann's body of work spans thirty years and encompasses both narrative and experimental films and video. Since 2000, she has been engaged in creating a body of experimental films that journeys through an abstract and poetic terrain, forming a sustained meditation on landscape, place and time. According to Cecilia Araneda in her essay titled Penny McCann: Within the Unsaid, A Response to Land Lines (of time and place) in no particular order: “McCann intervenes with our sense of the familiar with her use of hand-crafted analogue filmmaking approaches … purposefully setting it back into a kind of suspension that we immediately associate with the dream state of processing memories.”

In the past decade, McCann’s approach to image making shifted to include hand-processed techniques. In 2008 and 2010, Penny participated in the Independent Imaging Retreat, aka the Film Farm, in Mount Forest, Ontario, led by Philip Hoffman. Through these periods of study and experimentation, McCann has expanded her filmic vocabulary to include deeply resonant hand-processed 16mm imagery.

McCann’s work has been exhibited at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, Michigan), the Centre national d’art contemporain (Grenoble, France), the Hamburg International Short Film Festival (Hamburg, Germany), the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa), and the Cinémathèque Québecoise (Montréal, Québec).

A native of Kingston, Ontario, Penny lives and works in Ottawa and is a long-time activist/worker in the Canadian media and visual arts community including serving as chair of both the Independent Media Arts Alliance 1996-1999 and the Media Arts Network of Ontario, 2014-2016. Penny is past Director of SAW Video Media Art Centre (now Digital Art Resource Centre) from 2004-2018. In 2007 in recognition of her contribution to the Ottawa media arts community, Penny was awarded the Victor Tolgesy Award for achievement in the arts. She is a founding member of Ottawa's experimental Lightproof Film Collective.