Shannon Cochrane

Shannon Cochrane is a Canadian performance artist, curator and writer. Her work has been presented in museums, galleries, festivals and 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 interests include: language acquisition and people who have died on stage.

Over the last 25 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 Toronto Performance Art 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. She has also written about the performance works of individual artists such as Marilyn Arsem, John Court, Nezaket Ekici, André-Philip Lemke, Louise Liliefeldt, Tanya Mars and others. Her most recently text, Performance is a Ghost, Not a Grave: Two works by Roberto de la Torre was published in ROBERTO DE LA TORRE Art, Violence, and Extraction: Mexico City-Mumbai-Toronto in 2024 (M-C-M, Ice Press, University of Toronto, University of Illinois).