Grant Poier

Grant Poier is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Calgary since the mid seventies. He grew up in Saskatchewan and graduated from the Alberta College of Art (& Design) in 1980. His individual art practice includes installation and performance art, video, photography, text and assemblage. Since 1987 he has participated in collaborative art projects in Calgary and in Europe--notably, with The NOMADS, invited to exhibit and perform at documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, 1987, and at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics Arts Festival. From 1992 to 1998 he was a member of the collaborative performance group The SKEP(tic)KS, undertaking numerous site and context-specific projects and activities in Calgary. He has received numerous grants and awards to pursue his work.

Poier has also been intensively involved in the local/national arts community as a writer, curator, mentor and catalyst. He has served on many Boards, juries, programming panels and advisory committees. He was a co-founder in 1979, long-time administrator, and later, president and director, of EMMEDIA, an artist-run electronic media arts access and programming centre in Calgary. He was a (sessional) Media Arts instructor at the Alberta College of Art & Design from 1994 to 2000.

Beginning in 1996, he has been involved in several broad-based community cultural development initiatives. In 1998 and 99 he worked as the artist-director of YOMAM.CO (youth making art making community), a pilot project that was launched in 1998 by East Calgary Youth Art Projects to collaborate with youth and communities at risk. He is active in his home community of Bridgeland-Riverside, and is a founding member (2001) and co-chair of Labour and The Arts (the art-action committee of the Calgary & District Labour Council that launched Calgary?s first MAYworks Festival of Community Solidarity/Culture in 2003). He is also a founding member of the coalition behind the Activista Social Club enterprise, lending creative skills/strategies in working for social change. Poier currently holds a Canada Council Interdisciplinary Grant and is the first recipient of the ECHO Award (a one-year residency at EMMEDIA). Current projects in-progress include several video/media works, the Artist As Catalyst curatorial project, and Arts Included, a vehicle for collaborations with artists and community.