Teresa Marshall is a Canadian artist and poet. Her multimedia sculptures and installations address the ellipses and absences in the dominant Eurocentric version of North American history.
Background
Ethnicity:
Teresa Marshall is Mi'kmaq on her mother's side and Canadian on her father's side.
Teresa Marshall was born in 1962, in Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada. She grew up in a bi-cultural military family, partially on the Millbrook Reserve. Her father's career in the military influenced her education while summers spent with her grandmother in Millbrook established her indigenous roots. The dichotomy of living in two cultures shaped her artistic expression.
Education
Teresa Marshall obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1990, and she also attended theater studies at Dalhousie University in 1990.
Career
Since the early 1990s, Teresa Marshall has worked extensively as an instructor, juror, visiting artist, and lecturer across Canada. In 1993, she was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts; in 1994 - at Est-Nord-Est Centre du Sculpture in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec; and in 1998 - at The Roundhouse in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was affiliated with the theatre department at Dalhousie University.
Teresa Marshall creates multi-media and installation pieces that give a voice to Canada's First Nations - a voice that has been suppressed and neglected by colonization. Her works show and describe the effects of racism and neocolonialism on the First Nations people. Coming from two different backgrounds, Marshall shows both the indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives of her community and how they are affected. One of the pieces of Marshall's multimedia exhibit, "Red Rising Hoods" is "Hide and Seek the Souls You Keep Locked Away in God's Closet." It examines the impact of racism and neocolonialism and the changing role of women and how that has also adversely affected First Nations.
Marshall's poetry is represented in anthologies, including Gatherings: The En 'Owkin Journal of First North American Peoples, 1993; Kelusultiek: Original Women Voices of Atlantic Canada, 1994; Steal My Rage: New Native Voices, Douglas & McIntyre, 1995; and Native Women in the Arts: In a Vast Dreaming, 1995. She is a contributor of poetry to periodicals, including Fireweed Feminist Quarterly and Absinthe Literary Journal: Writings by Women of Color and Aboriginal Women.