The Recycling Issue

Shannon Cochrane is a Canadian performance artist, curator and writer. She holds a Honours Bachelor of Interpretation (American Sign Language–English) from George Brown Polytechnic, Toronto. Her performance work has been presented in museums, galleries, festivals and in all kinds of events across Canada and internationally in 25 countries. Shannon’s performance practice is primarily concerned with illustrating and working through the tensions between process and strategy, context and perception, and authorship and repetition. Recent proclivities include language acquisition, call-backs, dreams, swan songs and performers who have died on stage.

For close to 30 years, Shannon has contributed to the development of the Canadian performance art ecology through curating, programming, producing, advocating and supporting performance artists and their work. She is a founding member of Toronto’s 7A11D International Festival of Performance Art, and from 1996–2022 co-curated and organized 14 international performance festivals with the collective. As the current Director of FADO Performance Art since 2007, she has curated and produced the work of hundreds of performance artists from around the world for Toronto audiences. She has written about performance art as a discipline, form and practice for print, online and various platforms/projects. A recent text, Performance is a Ghost, Not a Grave: Two works by Roberto de la Torre (M-C-M, Ice Press, University of Toronto, University of Illinois) was published in ROBERTO DE LA TORRE Art, Violence, and Extraction: Mexico City––Mumbai–Toronto in 2024.