Alisha Piercy

Alisha Piercy is a fiction writer and visual artist in Tiotià:ke/Montréal in her second year PhD in Cultural Studies (Research-Creation) at Queen’s. Her research areas include hauntology, spectropolitics, claiming bad kin, Indigenous and non-western speculative/sci-fi worlding and Critical Animal Studies. In her doctoral work, in which theory interweaves with fiction, Alisha re-imagines the future through a series of creative “haunting” gestures. By centering spectral kinship and speculative worlding compositions as tools for ethnographic practice, she is exploring what it means to live with ghosts everyday in situated environments and across a plurality of dimensions, hoping to bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous hauntologies into conversation.  

Alisha's interdisciplinary work includes film and drawing installation, and she is the author of poetry, novels, and texts that write-with artists. She holds an MFA (Concordia University), an MA in Art Conservation (Queen’s University), and a BA in Literature (McGill University). Her work has been exhibited at Somerset House (London, UK), and AXENÉO7, Diagonale, fofa, MUTEK, Centre Clark, and Société des arts technologiques (SAT) (Montréal). Her fiction is published with Book*hug (Toronto) and she recently attended a writing residency with The Banff Centre to workshop one of her “settler-on-settler haunting” projects.