Jess Dobkin

USA / Canada
www.jessdobkin.com

Jess Dobkin has been a working artist, curator, activist, teacher and mentor for more than 30 years. Recent projects include For What It’s Worth commissioned by Wellcome Collection, London, UK, and Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Toronto, Canada. Jess’ practice extends across museums and galleries, art fairs and festivals, theatres and universities, public spaces and archives. Jess is the 2026-27 Artist-in-Residence at the Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL) at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, and Performing Archives Lead and Collaborating Artist of Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices (SSHRC). Her first monograph, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating Performance Archives, edited by Laura Levin and designed by Lisa Kiss Design (Intellect Books/AGYU, 2024) is now available. She has operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a human breast milk tasting bar, a soup kitchen for artists, and a performance festival hub for kids.

Dobkin is a recipient of a 2026 TO Live Explorations grant award, and her projects have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the Astraea Foundation, The Theatre Centre, and other institutional and community partners. She has taught as a Sessional Lecturer at OCAD University and the University of Toronto, and was a Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship to support her research in international performance art archives and was Artist-in-Residence at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at New York University. Her film and video works are distributed by Vtape and traces of her performance work are held in performance art archives internationally.

© Jess Dobkin, How Many Performance Artists Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb? (For Martha Wilson), 2015. Photo by Tania Anderson.

Artists

Documentation

Performance

Performance
Our Bodies Keeping Scores

A curatorial project by Jess Dobkin.

With: Germaine Liu, Juma Pariri, Juru, Karen Finley, Leslie Ting, María de Lourdes Santana Arcos, n:u (melissandre varin), Omar Estrada, Sara Baron-Goodman, Tamar Carter-King, Twysted Miyake-Mugler
Performance
Conjuring the Archive by Jess Dobkin

Conjuring the Archive, will invite the audience to create a DEMPSEY AND MILLAN TALIXMXN, an energetic archive of the performances and projects of Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan.
Performance
Commitment Issues curated by Jess Dobkin

Commitment Issues presents the work of artists who use their bodies as primary source material to investigate qualities and dimensions of commitment—to ideas, to performance, to audience and to the artists themselves.
Performance
Five Holes: Matters of Taste

Matters of Taste presents four performance environments dealing with the sense of taste in this final ‘gustatotry’ component of the Five Holes series.

Writing

Engagements

The Hemispheric Dinner Party Series

This series of dinner parties were made possible by Hemispheric Encounters, a partnership project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and FADO Performance Art Centre.
How Many Performance Artists Does it Take to Eat Brunch?

How Many Performance Artists Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb (For Martha Wilson) will be an attempt to overwhelm the definitions and intersections of performance, documentation, the archive and image reproduction to investigate the nature of performance itself. 

Series

Series
Five Holes

Five Holes provides artists and audiences with an opportunity to test their senses as they are now, informed by both history and imagination.
Series
MONOMYTHS

The MONOMYTHS perception of the universal journey dispels the notion of the lone patriarchal figure on a conquest to vanquish his demons–both inner and outer–in consideration of community, collectivity, and collaboration.

Books & Ephemera

FADO Performance Art Centre
445-401 Richmond Street West
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5V 3A8

info@performanceart.ca

Instagram

Artist Orange

Just as a performance artist uses their body as their medium, this is a fragrance composed entirely of the orange tree: fruit, leaves, bark, roots, and flowers. Artist Orange performs itself.

Top Notes

neroli, blood orange

Middle Notes

fresh orange juice, petit grain

Base Notes

orange twig, orange seed