Dayna McLeod

Dayna McLeod is a performance and video artist living in Montreal. Her work uses humour, and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions using cabaret, duration, single channel video, and installation practices. Dayna is at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University pursuing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Humanities that combines studies in performance art, feminism, queer theory, age, and research-creation practices. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University.

Dayna’s dissertation research examines how over-40 feminist performance artists use the body (their own or bodies-for-hire) within their practices and work in relationship to mainstream mass culture. As part of this research, McLeod embarked on a one-year durational performance piece that investigated and lived the stereotypes of a ‘cougar,’ a woman over-40 who aggressively demonstrates her sexuality, by wearing nothing but animal print clothing, 24/7 (archived at: www.CougarThis.com).

Dayna’s latest project, Uterine Concert Hall, is a sound-based, vaginal media project that features her uterus as the scene of the performance and the instrument of its production.