Lacie Burning is an emerging Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and Onondaga (patrilineal) artist and curator raised on Six Nations of the Grand River located in southern Ontario. They are a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, performance, installation, print, and sculpture. Burning is currently studying in the Visual Fine Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver. Having come from a culturally and politically grounded upbringing, their work focuses on politics of Indigeneity and identity from a Haudenosaunee perspective. More recently their practice has revolved around questions of Indigenous resistances, land issues, and haunting.
Burning’s work has been shown extensively in Vancouver and Ontario. In 2016, they were invited to participate in the Mush Hole Project at the Mohawk Institute, a former residential school that their family attended. Burning co-curated, along with scholar June Scudeler, Unsettling Colonial Gender Boundaries for the 2017 Queer Arts Festival. This exhibition commissioned new media works by Thirza Cuthand and Chandra Melting Tallow and also included past work by Kent Monkman and Raven Davis. They have also hosted QAF’s Art Salon, talking about the themes of Adrian Stimson’s UnSettled exhibition with Stimson and artists George Littlechild and Dayna Danger. Their 2012 work Story Time was critically acclaimed by Canadian Art in 2013 for their participation in NE:ETH: Going Out of the Darkness.
Burning currently sits on the executive board of directors for Vancouver Indigenous Media Arts Festival (VIMAF) as Secretary and also sits on the programming committee. They have worked extensively with youth, including with Urban Native Youth Association as a program assistant and youth leader for Overly Creative Minds as well as a volunteer with Child & Family Services as a primary prevention assistant in Ohsweken, Ontario.