Biography

Marian McMahon’s contribution to Canadian critical film and video discourse has been substantial; she was a writer, filmmaker, curator and scholar and in 2000 received her PhD posthumously (she passed away in 1996), from the University of Toronto (OISE – Ontario Institute of Studies in Education).

Marian was born in Windsor, Ontario in 1954. Her contributions were significant (not only in film and video circles but in Canadian art discourse) in creating a dialogue for women’s experiences, interlacing personal and shared subjectivities to examine the dominant framework of the Canadian nationhood and history. The exhibition, Dialogic Illuminations of Marian McMahon, at the Art Gallery of Windsor in 2014, aimed to pay homage to the work of an artist who bridged multiple boundaries through her life working between caregiving (she worked as a registered nurse from 1974 to 1984) and making art, academia and film, photography and text. In all of her work, Marian McMahon was committed to the evolution of autobiography, and the complexity of the `subject’ within the written word. Her film Nursing History (1989) has been screened widely, and is distributed through V-tape in Toronto and her unfinished work Racing Home is now available as a work in progress (1996) and as an open-source non-linear interactive Korsakow film (2014).