Dana Inkster is an Alberta-based media artist and cultural producer.
Unlike many filmmakers, it is not cinema that has formed her relationship to working
with the moving image. Although she has no musical training, the vast majority of her
works begin with song and lyric. The trajectory of oral histories of musical traditions of
jazz, blues and hip-hop anchor her works in rhythmic form and structure.
The trajectory of oral histories and literary tradition of Zora Neale Hurston, James
Baldwin and especially Toni Morrison have greatly informed the tone of her work. As
with these literary artists, Inkster’s works embodies recurring themes love, violence,
injustice and emotional conflict.
The artist’s engagement with the social phenomenon of displacement, relocation and
adaptation in the Diasporic experience are central to her communication with audiences
beyond the boundaries of culture into the realm of shared human vulnerability and
resilience in the face of adversity.
Her career as an established artist in Canada has brought many opportunities to examine
the manner in which storytelling, narrative and creative writing has been central to her
practice as a media artist for over a decade.
Inkster’s experimental works strive to delve more deeply into the nuanced truths that
cannot be conveyed by the artist within the traditional form of documentary. Her work
experiments with the conventions of the documentary genre to reveal how storytelling,
the imagination and the truth conspire.