Art Writer and Theoretician (photography), Professor at the University of Ottawa, Director and Graduate Program Director, Department of Visual Arts, Ottawa, Ontario
Penny Cousineau-Levine is an art writer and theoretician with a long-held interest in photography. She studied at Loyola College (now Concordia University) in Montreal with the photographers John Max and Charles Gagnon, and received an M.F.A. in Photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, where her thesis supervisor was Nathan Lyons. She has been writing about the work of Canadian and other photographers since 1974; her writing has appeared in Afterimage, Canadian Art, Parachute and other art journals, and in numerous exhibition catalogues. In 1983, she produced a limited edition set of 18 original photographs entitled “Canadian Portfolio,” which included the work of Evergon, Robert Frank, Gabor Szilasi, and Geoffrey James and others, and which is represented in the collections of many major Canadian galleries and museums. Her 2003 book Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination was the first in-depth examination of Canadian photography and identity, and was short-listed for the Raymond Klibansky Prize for Best English Language Book in the Humanities. She has curated or co-curated exhibits of photography at Gallery 44 and TPW in Toronto, In Plain Sight Gallery in Montreal, of which she was co-director, and in 2006 she curated, with Claude Simard, Faking Death, an exhibition of the work of 58 Canadian photographers held at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City. She is currently working on a book on masquerade and alter-egos in visual art; in 2008 she was awarded a residency fellowship by the Australian National University where she presented the paper “Subversive Strategies: Masquerade in Photography and Performance Art” at the conference Photographies: New Histories, New Practices conference. In 2013, she presented “Performing Identities: the Representational Strategies of Kent Monkman,” at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University in Ottawa, and in that year she also conducted a public interview with the photographer Laura Letinsky at the Carleton University Art Gallery. She taught for many years in the Photography Program in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University, and is now a professor at the University of Ottawa, where she has served as Director and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Visual Arts.