Dayna McLeod is a queer, middle-aging performance-based media artist whose work uses autoethnographic methods to explore embodiment, sexuality, gender, feminism, aging, illness, grief, and care. Working across performance, video, installation, and interactive media, she appropriates and retools consumer technologies to examine how bodies, identities, and emotions are represented, regulated, and experienced. Humour, duration, and lived experience are central to her practice, which often transforms everyday technologies into sites of queer intervention.
Following the death of her wife MJ from pancreatic cancer in 2024, and her own colon cancer diagnosis during MJ’s palliative care, McLeod’s work has increasingly focused on grief, survival, and community. Her recent three-channel installation Queer. Widow. Cancer. (2025) used AI-generated versions of herself to explore caregiving, illness, and loss, and was exhibited in Devenirs partagés. Pratiques de l’IA at the Galerie de l’Université de Montréal (November 2025-February 2026). Her current research shifts toward tactile and affective technologies, investigating how objects designed to comfort, monitor, and regulate the body might be hacked and reimagined through queer feminist approaches to touch, vulnerability, empathy, and care.
27 May 2026
4 November 2016
22 October 2011
22 October 2011
