Nancy Lee 李南屏 is a Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary media artist, curator, filmmaker, DJ and cultural producer. Their work stimulates and enlivens space, making a provocative statement about how inescapably interconnected we are with our surroundings. This notion of staging is a constant in Nancy’s work and underpins their projects, from their early work as a more traditional filmmaker, through their conception and planning of live events, and into the realms of XR, new media performance and installation, where their art practices continue to coalesce and evolve.
As a music video and experimental film director, their practice is centered around the exploration of choreography and emerging technologies. They recently co-created “Telepresence”, a VR 8-channel surround-sound live performance with Western Front, and “Tidal Traces”, an VR 360 dance film with the National Film Board of Canada.
Nancy is a co-producer and co-founder of CURRENT: Feminist Electronic Art Symposium, an intersectional and multidisciplinary initiative featuring artistic and educational programming for and by women, nonbinary artists and artists of colour. In 2019, CURRENT evolved into a 3-day mentorship program offering emerging cultural producers local internship opportunities. As a community music consultant, Nancy has worked with CreativeBC as a grant coach, and outreach facilitator to improve the accessibility of their funding programs. They were also involved in Vancouver Music Strategy as a facilitator advocating for the DIY music community, and have since developed two pilot programs with the City of Vancouver which provided entrepreneurial capacity building workshops and micro-grants for equity-deserving artists. Nancy is currently a WebVR workshop facilitator with the Indigenous Matriarch 4 Lab at Emily Carr University and the board president of Love Intersections, a media arts collective made up of queer artists of colour dedicated to using collaborative art making and relational storytelling to address systemic racism. In 2018, they were nominated for a YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Art, Cultural & Design.
Their films and interdisciplinary works have been presented at Cannes Film Festival, SXSW, MUTEK Japan, Bass Coast Festival, FUSE at Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Pride, Alberta Electronic Music Conference, Vancouver International Jazz Festival,International Symposium on Electronic Art (Vancouver, South Africa and South Korea), and more. Nancy is a Sundance Institute New Frontier Alumni and Interdisciplinary Program Grantee. Currently, Nancy is collaborating with Kiran Bhumber on a speculative-sci fi solo exhibition exploring 3D scanning, 3D printing, XR, and live performance, scheduled for April 2021 at the Richmond Art Gallery.