Canada
www.daynarama.com
Dayna McLeod is a queer performance-based media artist. Her work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions. At the core of her work is a queer, aging, feminist, perimenopausal (for now!) body whether the audience wants to see or hear from it or not. She stages this aging body in often uncomfortable proximity to her audience, collapsing the space between them literally and figuratively to challenge their fears and desires about queer bodies marked female.
Dayna earned a PhD from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University that combined studies in performance art, feminism, queer theory, age, and research-creation practices. Dayna’s dissertation research examined how over-40 feminist performance artists use the body (their own or bodies-for-hire) within their practices and work in relationship to mainstream mass culture. As part of this research, McLeod embarked on a one-year durational performance piece that investigated and lived the stereotypes of a ‘cougar,’ a woman over-40 who aggressively demonstrates her sexuality, by wearing nothing but animal print clothing, 24/7 (archived at: www.CougarThis.com).
Dayna’s work has been presented at OFFTA in Montréal, FADO Performance Art Centre in partnership with SummerWorks Performance Festival in Toronto, the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, the Abrons Art Center in NYC, Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in Montreal, the Impakt Festival in Utrecht Netherlands, the Mardi Gras Festival in Darlinghurst Australia, MIX Brasil Festival Of Sexual Diversity in São Paulo Brazil, the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw Poland, the City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts in Ljubljana Slovenija, and Le Centre d’art contemporain in Paris. She is currently working with AI tools to explore human to non-human collaboration, embodiment, and performativity to examine issues of the uncanny, embodiment, representation, and authenticity.
© Dayna McLeod, Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall, 2018. Photo Henry Chan.