Open Studio Artist in Residence | bree gant

June 17 - July 22, 2026 

Screening and Workshop | Saturday, July 11, 1pm

We’re so excited to welcome our second Open Studio Artists in Residence for 2026 – bree gant!

bree gant is an artist and thinker from the Westside of Detroit. Their interdisciplinary practice remarks on the forces that shape and distort workings of power in everyday life. bree studied film at Howard University while gentrification paved over Washington, DC and moved back to Detroit, when the city filed for bankruptcy, to see the cranes had followed them home. bree spends a significant amount of time binging science fiction and fantasy, waiting for the bus, and elbow-leaning in windows. 

"I’m an artist and thinker from the Westside of Detroit. My work circles the intersection of performance and the lens, using film as a method for theorizing embodied knowledge, as well as a performance studies framework to contend with the imperial origins of photographic imagemaking. I'm partial to the lens because it affords the capacity to work on the other side of time, to work with time as a medium and collaborator. The lens–container, frame, threshold–makes myth. Through photography, film, video, and projection, I get to perform alongside my community, my ancestors, and myself across timespace and through the veil.

The laborious, iterative processes of archiving inspire me, and I follow this call to gather and return through collage. On video and on paper, through layers of time, form, and material, I use collage to return to complex affective experiences and compose new imaginaries. I often find myself returning to the Westside of Detroit, to house dance floors, to water and love and liberation and grief. I find myself returning to these words from bell hooks: “Even this yearning is a way to know.”"

The Open Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Arts & Culture NB, and ArtsNB.