Camille Georgeson Usher

bio/

Camille Georgeson-Usher, PhD, is a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish writer, artist, and scholar from Galiano Island, British Columbia, unceded territories of the Penelakut and Lamalcha First Nations, as well as other Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples and is the ceded traditional territories of Tsawwassen First Nation. She completed her PhD in the Cultural Studies department at Queen’s University where she considered social landscape of gatherings and particularly how the personal, minuscule details of everyday life impact how we come together and how we build space, together. Her dissertation is titled “The Threshold for Gathering” and was completed in March 2024. Usher is interested in the many ways in which peoples move together through space, how public art becomes a site for gathering, and intimacies with the everyday from an Indigenous perspective. She uses her practice as a long-distance runner as a methodology for embodied theory and an alternative form of sensing place.

She is Assistant Professor, Modern and Contemporary Indigenous Art at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC in the department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory.

Usher completed her MA in Art History at Concordia University. Her thesis, “more than just flesh: the arts as resistance and sexual empowerment,” focused on how the arts may be used as a tool to engage Indigenous youth in discussions of health and sexuality.

She is an award-winning writer whose work merges theory with poetry and at times, science-fiction; she has been published widely across academic books, magazines, arts journals, and exhibition texts.

In addition to her academic work, she serves on several boards, currently she is: Co-Chair of the Toronto Biennial of Art; a Board Member of the Inspirit Foundation; Secretary and Board Member of the Canadian Art Foundation; and a Board Member of the Galiano Island Literary Festival. [NOTE: I will not be accepting invitations to join new boards until 2026]

She is an independent writer and curator and has a casual artistic practice as a public artist with works across Canada. Currently she has public piece on view at Open Space in Victoria, BC titled Until it swells. Through this work she investigated the history of Victoria’s coastline in tandem with the proliferation of invasive species and how they change the ways we travel across space.

In addition to Usher’s professional and academic work she also has a profound love of long distance running and has completed 10 full marathons, one of which was a 50km event that thread through mountainous trails in Quebec.

She lives in Vancouver, BC but can be more often found on Galiano Island.