Join artist Heidi McKenzie for a conversation with Devyani Saltzman, AGO Director of Public Programs, about her recent work.

Heidi McKenzie is a Toronto-based ceramic installation artist. She has been practising full-time since graduating with an MFA in Art Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCADU in 2014. Heidi left behind a 20-year career in arts management and radio production to apprentice with Mini Singh in India in 2009. She has worked as an artist in residence in Jingdezhen, China; Bali, Indonesia; Gudlagergaard, Denmark; Sydney, Australia; Kecskemet, Hungary and Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. Her work has been collected and exhibited internationally. Heidi works in abstraction and in series in order to convey complex narratives and/or social commentary about herself, a culture, or her hybrid identity. In 2014 Heidi began working with image on clay. Her recent works relate to her own healing journey, her father’s second exile from Trinidad to Canada, and her mixed ancestry: Indo-Caribbean indentured workers, and migrants who fled Ireland during the Famine.

Devyani Saltzman is a Canadian writer and curator with a deep interest in relevant, multidisciplinary, programming at the intersection between art, ideas and social change. She is the Director of Public Programming at the AGO, and the former Director of Literary Arts at the Banff Centre, the first woman and first woman of colour in that role, as well as a Founding Curator of Luminato, North America's largest multi arts festival. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, National Post, The Atlantic and Tehelka, India's weekly of arts and investigative journalism. She sits on the boards of the Writers’ Trust of Canada and SummerWorks Performance Festival, and has been a juror for the National Magazine Awards, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and The Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Saltzman has a degree in Anthropology and Sociology from Oxford.