Documenting the Legacy of Indian Residential Schools in Canada

Thursday, March 30, 2017 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Join documentary photographer Daniella Zalcman who will discuss Signs of Your Identity, a series of composite portraits she created to document the legacy of Canada’s Indian residential schools.

"These portraits are my attempt to get to the root of historical trauma. Each of these double exposures layers a former residential school student with something related to his or her experience: the sites where schools once stood, the cemeteries where over 6,000 indigenous children are buried, the documents that enforced strategic assimilation," says Daniella.

A graduate of GSAPP, Daniella is a multiple grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation, and a member of Boreal Collective. Her work focuses on the legacies of western colonization, from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the forced assimilation education of Indigenous children in North America. She won the 2016 FotoEvidence Book Award, the Magnum Foundation's Inge Morath Award, and the Magenta Foundation's Bright Spark Award for Signs of Your Identity.