From 2018 to 2020 I was the Creative Producer for Kent Monkman Studio, working directly with Kent and Brad Tinmouth, our Creative Director to bring their ideas to life.

During my time there, we produced 15 paintings (not including studies or etchings), including Kent’s largest pieces that catapulted him forward into the American art world - mistikosiwak (Wooden Boat People) - Welcoming the Newcomers and Resurgence of the People. These paintings were commissioned by and later also acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This work is best explained by the studio published mini-doc above.

The role of production when it came to working at this scale, was closer to that of a short film. Kent and team worked off of photo references, once Kent had sketched out an initial composition, we would collectively breakdown the kind of actor we would cast to shoot, including any props and environmental features such as stages or pools (ask me about the boat in Resurgence of the People). We would then schedule a shooting day to bring in actors into the studio, once shooting was done we would go through and make selects before spending weeks making the perfect composite for the painters to use for their reference.

While in production, mini-docs would be filmed and published by the studio to their YouTube channel, and used when Kent would go to speaking arrangements to help iterate on these pieces. The mini-doc that I filmed and produced on mistikosiwak was aired on TVO and CBC.