Chantal duPont

Born in Montreal, Chantal duPont (1942–2019) was a multidisciplinary artist and associate professor at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l'UQAM, where she taught from 1985 to 2008. Throughout her career, she participated in numerous international video festivals and presented her work in solo and group exhibitions in Quebec and abroad. Her video works gained international recognition and received awards at numerous festivals in Belgium, Colombia, France, Portugal, and Montreal. In 2001, she received the Prix à la création artistique from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for her video Du front tout le tour de la tête. In 2006, she received the Bell Canada Award for Video Art in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the field. Since 1996, her works and installations explored themes of family and cultural identity, self-representation, bodily vulnerability, memory, and writing as both an object and a creative process. She was also interested in the narrative forms that emerge from the interplay between reality and fiction through digital media. From 2011 to 2013, she served on the board of directors of Vidéographe, an artist-run centre dedicated to the creation, distribution, and dissemination of independent video art. She was also a member of Hexagram/UQAM, a research centre in media arts at UQAM, and the Centre interuniversitaire des arts médiatiques (CIAM). She died in Montreal in 2019, just days after presenting an exhibition at UQAM’s Cœur des sciences.