Paul Couillard

Background

Couillard was born August 1, 1961 in Chatham, New Brunswick.

Career

In the 1980s, he worked as a civil servant in Ottawa before seeing a performance of Gaia, Mon Amour by Los Angeles-based artist Rachel Rosenthal, which inspired him to quit his government job and begin making art He worked as an organizer and creator in the Canadian artist-run centre network, producing many text-based and theatrical performances before moving to Toronto in 1989. A performance tour in Japan in 1991 influenced him to abandon spoken narrative in favour of experiential and action-based works.

In 1993 he and four other Toronto artists formed the Fado collective, which eventually became the artist-run centre Fado Performance Incorporated., incorporated in 2001.

Couillard was the Performance Art Curator of Fado from its inception until 2007, producing a number of notable international performance art series based on various formal thematics, including "Time Time Time" (1999), "Public Spaces/Private Places" (2000–2003) and "IDea" (2005–2008). In 1995, Couillard began creating durational performance works, often lasting 24 hours or longer.

Together they have created more than 100 works in their ongoing Duorama series, which began in 2000. Couillard has also written various texts on performance art, and is the editor of Canadian Performance Art Legends, a series of book/Digital Video Disc publications on senior Canadian performance artists.

Membership

He is also a founding member of the 7a*11d collective, which presents a biannual international performance art festival.

Connections

Partner:

Editor Johnson