Shelley Niro is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) Nation, from the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, near Brantford, Ontario. She is an award-winning multi media artist known for challenging conventional, colonial representations of Aboriginality with directness and humour.
Her short film, The Shirt, was presented at the 2003 Venice Biennale and the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. In 2009, her first feature film, Kissed by Lightning, which she developed at WIDC, premiered at Toronto’s imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and won the Santa Fe Film Festival’s 2009 Milagro Award for Best Indigenous Film. Niro’s work can be found in the collections of galleries and museums across Canada.
A graduate of OCAD University, Niro also studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts and received her MFA from the University of Western Ontario. She is a WIDC 2003 alumna. In February 2017 she was honoured with a Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts for her dedication to producing art that contributes to Indigenous identity in Canada.