Sally McKay

Sally McKay is a Canadian artist, curator, writer, educator, and personal art coach based in Hamilton, Ontario. McKay is known for her work as an artist of many forms and her research, which explores cognition, consciousness and social structures with a particular interest in the intersections between art and science. McKay has worked in a variety of media including performance, installation and digital art. She is also a widely recognized educator and art coach known for her collaborative work and has worked at a number of Canadian universities. McKay has written for, founded and edited several publications and magazines, most notably Lola.

Early life and education Sally McKay was born in Saskatoon and grew up near London, Ontario. Her father, poet Don McKay, and her mother, Jean McKay, were both writers. McKay's brother Joe is also an artist. McKay attended Medway High School in Arva, Ontario before studying at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with an Art History Minor, in 1990. In the years following her graduation, McKay moved to Toronto where she established herself as an artist and curator. McKay has also produced work with a social purpose and has seen performance art as having the power to transform society. McKay combined performance art and advocacy in her 1998 work with Spirit of Spadina. McKay created a number of mass-protests and performances in the middle of Toronto's highways to draw attention to the number of cyclists killed in Toronto. From 2012 to 2014, while she was still completing her PhD, she was also a Full Time Lecturer in the School of the Arts at McMaster University. McKay has suggested her teaching philosophy positions student-directed learning as the core value of her teaching practice.

McKay later developed an interest in gender roles and anthropomorphic notions of nature. In 2000, McKay developed "The Miss Mouse Project" which consisted of a series of performances and video art. Since completing a PhD on the relationship between neuroscience and art McKay has published articles in a number of academic journals about cognitive science and art, including Canadian Art and RACAR as well as contributing a chapter to Alfonso Scarzini's book Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind. According to McKay "Woodlot" explores "cultivated landscapes" as a theme and interrogates mankind's relationship and mastery over nature.

Honours and achievements In 2013 McKay was awarded the Joyce and Fred Zeman's Scholarship by York University. This annual scholarship is awarded to graduate students recommended by their graduate programme director for academic excellence. McKay was awarded the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarship, which secured $35,000 worth of funding each year from 2010 to 2012. This scholarship is awarded by the Government of Canada. McKay was also awarded the Ontario Association of Art Galleries' Art Writing Award in 2011 for her essay "Nature in the Network". McKay's essay, on the Canadian artist collective, was published in the catalogue which accompanied the Art Gallery of York University's 2011 exhibition "Donkey@Ninja@Witch".