Karen Henry

Karen Henry began curating in 1983 when she was invited to work on programming for Video Inn (now VIVO). Video was a new and open field of art and social documentary. This foundational period culminated in the exhibition Luminous Sites: Ten Video Installations (1986), in collaboration with Daina Augaitis. After a time of immersion in video, performance and artist-run culture as Director of the Western Front (1987-1991), she became Director/Curator of the Burnaby Art Gallery (1991-1997) and produced a survey exhibition, in collaboration with Brice MacNeil, of Glenn Lewis’s photography and performance-based practices. Her exhibitions at Burnaby focussed on the garden, the collection and contemporary art by women artists. She subsequently worked with Marian Penner Bancroft (1999) and Allyson Clay (2002) on significant exhibitions of their work. As Adjunct Curator at Presentation House Gallery (now Polygon)(1999-2002), she produced several photo and media-based exhibitions including War Zones (1999), the first of two collaborative shows with friend and mentor Karen Love. Collaboration as a way of working and support of the work of women artists are two significant threads in a practice based in media, photography and performance art. She has often addressed relationships between performance and photography in her writing. She worked as an independent curator and public art consultant from 1996-2010 and as a public art planner at the City of Vancouver from 2011-2025, helping to produce over 40 public art projects.